I am not going to reference any of our discussions in class or topics we have covered in readings. Station Eleven is obviously a great book and I want to talk about it in a vacuum. I want to cover how this book exudes such a sense of realism in such an unrealistic situation; how fantastical it is but also so emotionally compelling that draws you in.
The beginning reminded me of a movie, where we are immediately dropped into a fast-moving environment. The characters we are attached to in the beginning not only introduce the Georgia Flu so well, but they are engaging and, just so damn human. While we only know Jeevan for a single chapter, I understood his thought process and felt a connection with his emotional decisions and rationalizing.
While the first chapter feels stand-alone at times, Station Eleven does such a good job of intertwining different points of the story in ways you wouldn’t expect. Like how Jeevan’s photograph of the man who suffered a heart attack was in a magazine that one of the survivors of the Traveling Symphony carries around and reads religiously. The novel just does such a good job of making these connections feel natural. We know they are creations of the author, that they are not believable coincidences, but they are just so well executed that I liked and accepted them.
It didn’t hit me until chapter 11, when the author draws the parallels of the plague that hit during Shakespeare’s time to the Georgia Flu. Things like this, themes like the rebirth of society, the aspiring nature of man to do more than survive, or our resilience as a species, they are all such tropes that are overdone in every other post-apocalyptic work but somehow work well here. I feel like this blog post has been overly gushing, but reading through this first section I keep looking up from the book and realizing how much I’ve been sucked into the emotionally compelling story that I let any sense of believably fly over my head.
I’m including a gif from Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream because it seems appropriate.
