Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

It's Spring Break, and I wanted to read something fun yet thought-provoking -- my go-to genre is dystopian fiction, and Station Eleven is a book that has been on my to-read list for a while. How can I summarize the novel? It is a story of a post-apocalyptic Traveling Symphony/Shakespeare Troupe. It is the life story of an actor, now dead, and all he touched in his "six degrees of separation." It is a story of what matters in life and what doesn't, although that part is blurry, both before and after the pandemic flu that wipes out most of the world. It is a journey that has a similar plot device and philosophic bent as The Road, but less of its heart-wrenching description and gore. More to simply think about without any of the accompanying nausea.

It was an easy read; I finished it in two days. But it's the kind of book that I want to immediately reread to pick out all the nuances I missed the first time around. There's a lot there and a lot to think about. Based on the content and the style (lyrical, like a symphony), I am left with an expansive feeling of beauty (despite the emptiness and destruction amply depicted in the novel), but that beauty comes with strings attached. It doesn't come with the revelation of the big things in life that matter -- it comes with a question of what truly matters. Do the relationships the actor (either one) has with other people matter? Are they important and were they real? Or are they akin to the collection of ephemera located in the Museum that houses relics like iPhones and licenses from before the collapse of civilization. Do words matter, either the text of King Lear or the dialogue bubbles from the surviving comic book or the last words recorded on a phone message or the strange corporate-speak colloquialisms left over from another era? Two characters cling to words from the comic book, some meaning they try to cobble together from the past, but one character uses those words in a search for connection and the other uses them to condone the violence he forces upon others. As the narrative perspective shifts from person to person, we see those connections being made but also connections lost: many plot elements converge in the end, but others are simply dropped (whatever happened to Elizabeth?). Clearly, this is a theme of the post-apocalyptic world, but the flashes back to life before the pandemic remind us that it is also a theme of the world before even if it was sometimes not examined in their fast-paced, high-tech lifestyle.

I recommend reading this as I did, with the soundtrack from Hamilton playing during the breaks from reading as I drove my daughter around to her obligatory rehearsals. That made for an even more lyrical and philosophical reading experience.