November Book Club - Station Eleven

An epic group—13 women!—gathered on Wednesday the 20th to discuss Emily St. John Mandle’s “Station Eleven.” Thanks so much to Alice Smith for hosting us.

We had mixed reactions to this post-apocalyptic novel. We liked the relatable characters, their resilience, the way Mandel highlighted friendship and community in the face of disaster. We appreciated the tone of the book, “surprisingly not grim.” We talked about the motifs Mandel wove in: a snow globe; a set of limited-edition comic books that give the book its title; Shakespeare and “King Lear” with its blasted heath; a “pervading sense of loss”; the importance of preserving the arts (“survival is insufficient”); luck and chance. But several of us found the jumps from one character to another, from present day to backstory, hard to track. And all of us got picky about details of this situation—for instance, would there really be no one who knew how to generate electricity? Why did none of Mandel’s characters  trek across the country to find a beloved child? So, she got us to join her in imagining a radically de-populated world.