#emily st john mandel

[bookishfreedom]

my weekend: 🏕️🏊‍♀️🏔️📖💫🌲🛶

[lillyli-74]

Hell is the absence of the people you long for.

~Emily St. John Mandel

[ech0ech0ech0]

If you're going through hell, keep going

Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation // Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven // The Magnus Archives 165 - Revolutions // Hannah Baer’s words, featured in Raving by McKenzie Wark // Alice Oseman, Solitaire // Jeff VanderMeer, Dead Astronauts // The School of Life, Overcoming Bad Inner Voices, sampled in Mirror by Porter Robinson

[theboyatthebustop]

In honor of this post of mine getting over one hundred notes, I decided to do a sequel because I found some more

Edit: found some more

[lananis]

can't recommend this book enough

[bigbookslilreads]

"She was thinking about the way she'd always taken for granted that the world had certain people in it, either central to her days or unseen and infrequently thought of. How without any one of these people the world is a subtly but unmistakably altered place, the dial turned just one or two degrees."

-- Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel

[lastseenleaving]

Sea of Tranquility - Emily St John Mandel

"I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we’re living at the climax of the story. It’s a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we’re uniquely important, that we’re living at the end of history, that now, after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst that it’s ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world.”

“But all of this raises an interesting question,” Olive said. “What if it always is the end of the world?”

She paused for effect. Before her, the holographic audience was almost perfectly still. “Because we might reasonably think of the end of the world,” Olive said, “as a continuous and never-ending process.”

[wellconstructedsentences]

Kirsten stood in the state of suspension that always came over her at the end of performances, a sense of having flown very high and landed incompletely, her soul pulling upward out of her chest.

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

[literary-illuminati]

Book Review 50 – Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

I read this book over the course of one day and two flights,, which on the one hand was probably not the best way to do it but on the other is kind of appropriate given the prominence of travel and dislocation to the narrative. Anyway, reading so quickly and then spending a week on vacation without time to work on this review does mean that my thoughts are all a bit vague and muddled, so apologies about that in advance. Anyways!

The only other work of St. John Mandel’s I’ve read was Station Eleven, which was easily one of the best things I read last year and good enough to put this on my TBR as well. I went in basically entirely blind, beyond the basics of ‘time travel’ and ‘COVID novel’. It might just be that my expectations were too high, but frankly I found it a fairly disappointing read, and pretty strictly inferior to Station Eleven in just about everything – the later even manages to be a better pandemic novel despite the handicap of being published in 2014. My main reaction to finishing it was something along the lines of ‘that’s it?’ and then going back to staring down at the clouds.

The book jumps POVs a fair bit, but the deuteragonists are an author on a global book tour in the days before a pandemic sweeps the world (and moon) in the 22nd century, and a bit of an aimless failson in the 23rd who gets a job investigating a temporal anomaly through the power of nepotism and goes back to interview her and a few others across the centuries who were touched by it. The detective is the one who drives essentially all of the plot and makes all the choices – none of the POVs are really filled with a surfeit of passion or drive, the author is the only one who seems to particularly like her life – but by wordcount and focus I very much got the sense that the author was far more of the book’s emotional heart than the 20th or 21st century POVs. (Which is something of a shame, because I found both of them rather more compelling in the screentime they did have, being honest).

The plot is, well, thin. Our 23rd century POV (a hotel detective) is repeatedly told that he will be tempted to do something (save the author from her scheduled pandemic death) and warned of consequences if he does, repeatedly promises that he will not, and then as soon as the chance presents itself does the thing with basically no warning or introspection, after which he faces almost exactly the consequences he was warned of. He is then saved through the power of a supergenius sister ex machina, and the whole anomaly is tied up in a neat time loop in a vague reality-as-narrative sort of way. As a work that’s more literary than genre the characters all felt kind of flat and static, no one ever really surprised or fascinated me.

And as far as it as a science fiction novel goes, I don’t know – there’s a decent chance it’s a much more impressive read if you haven’t zoned out scrolling past dozens of pages of earnest debate on the simulation hypothesis and read/watched however many different time loop stories before? It could have all fit pretty nicely in a mid-season Doctor Who episode, honestly, and I don’t really mean that as a compliment.

Emotionally, the experience of living through COVID is pretty clearly at the heart of the thing. Both the sense of pure terror at realizing your survival is a matter of luck and statistics, the isolation and alienation from the world that’s part and parcel of lockdown, the sort of awesome horror at looking back across history and realizing how totally unremarkable seeing such mass death around you is over the centuries, how in a generation it will be nothing but a bit of trivia. This stuff was definitely more compelling than the rest of the book, though it did fall prey to a rapidly growing pet peeve of mine and just kind of forgot all the ‘essential workers’ who weren’t doctors or nurses and just kind of write them out of the universal pandemic lockdown experience.

Anyway yeah, not in any sense a badly written book, but I found it a disappointment.

[hopecatcher]

We traveled so far and your friendship meant everything. It was very difficult, but there were moments of beauty. Everything ends. I am not afraid.

Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

[supernutellastuff]

Yooo I just read station eleven it was fantastic

(saw your tag on a post)

Also I really want to see those graphic novels it’s a shame they’re not real

Hiii I love Station Eleven so much. I can go on for years about it!

I first read it in December 2019, when news of coronavirus was just breaking. So that was obviously an anxiety-provoking experience haha. And then I re-read it last year, "post pandemic", and it holds up so well! Apocalyptic/sci-fi stories that centre the beauty of humanity, art, music, culture, cooperation, community, etc is one of my fav genres (re Mad Max Fury Road, Arrival, etc.). And yes my favourite bit was those graphic novels, it was so satisfying to read how she came up with the idea, the description of the text and the artwork - and it was brilliant to see how it touched multiple lives. I want to read them too!

Have you watched the HBO show based on the book? I still haven't, I'm a little scared it might not capture the book's essence haha. Also, I recommend the author's other books - Glass Castle and Sea of Tranquility - they don't reach the heights of Station Eleven imo but they're still pretty good, and they're set in parallel/overlapping timelines so some familiar characters turn up :)

[saltlickmp3]

thinking about the line in sea of tranquility 'we all secretly long for a world with less technology'. yeah.

[macademmia]

FANTASTIC MR. FOX (2009) dir. WES ANDERSON / SEA OF TRANQUILITY (2022) by EMILY ST JOHN MANDEL

[st-just]

The revelation of privacy: she can walk down the street and absolutely no one knows who she is. It's possible that no one who didn't grow up in a small place can understand how beautiful this is, how the anonymity of city life feels like freedom.

-Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel

[bookloure]

“A deer crossed the road ahead and paused to look at them before it vanished into the trees. The beauty of this world where almost everyone was gone. If hell is other people, what is a world with almost no people in it?”

The more you love something, the harder it is to talk about. And that's definitely the case with Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven.

I first fell in love with this story in 2015. In the years that have gone by, I've lost all the plot and details of this story. But I never forgot how it made me feel. That last scene is imprinted still, in my memory...

Station Eleven is set in a wasteland, some twenty years after a pandemic wiped out 99% of the population and subsequent societal collapse. Unlike most futuristic dystopian novels, Emily St John Mandel put humanity back into the past: without the Internet, without the capacity to travel great distances, without the safety of laws, without society as we know it. Told in fragments and shifting timelines, we mainly follow a theater group known as the Traveling Symphony as they go through towns and settlements near one of the Great Lakes, performing Shakespeare.

Revisiting this now, it felt like reading the story for the first time. And it pleases me that this old favorite stood the passage of time. It's still a beautiful and well-written story about the human condition.

It's a story about pandemics, about found families, about the importance of community, curiosity, and hope.

And above all, this is a story about the necessity of art. After all, survival is insufficient.

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