station eleven

i long wanted to finish this book. given to me by james during our 2014 christmas  dinner, i was excited to start flipping thru its pages and i finally finished it about 5 months ago (yeah, only writing about it now!). like i've said, it takes me a whole lot of time to finish a book. this is because the boobtube almost always wins and i get tv-ed. it's always a milestone when i get to finish one… so congratulations is in order.

when i drew its 333^rd page, it was if i said goodbye to a friend. i guess that's what happens when you had a great time reading a book. kirsten raymonde's odyssey into a world after almost 99% of the population were wiped out by a flu plague was quite a journey for me as well. in the order (after the plague), she became involved with the travelling symphony, a group of performers roaming america's new frontier towns to perform shakespearean materials, stopping by into these towns for a while and then moving on to another. the greater part of mendel's narrative switches from the world before the plague and after it when raymonde and the travelling symphony traverses the deserted towns of america looking for a safer haven. the ending was all about surviving when majority of survivors were all disillusioned and would do anything, including blindly following a "new age leader", in order to stay alive.

  

while i didn't like the way she ended the book, emily st. john mendel perfectly put together a tale that started with the death of an actor while performing on stage and how intertwining lives were connected by one single event that led to the demise of human civilization as we know it today. through seemingly unrelated characters and events, the lives of individuals in a flatter world in 2000s, were interconnected. everyday issues on relationships and failures of which, as well as common career concerns have been given light. of course, the eternal message on familial ties, community-based ties and the powers that govern these have been key themes of the book. culture, media and the arts are in the middle of this tale, which makes it relatable to anyone living in this great age of creative disruption. but i guess mendel's message here is that even with man's greatest inventions, everything can we be erased in no time and man will go back to his past ways… horse driven carriages, manual drawings of graphic novels and to his primitive roots of looking up the sky for guidance and how to make sense of what happened.

 

ultimately, mendel says that man can survive doomsday. many might argue that relooking and revisiting arts is not how man can rise from the ashes. but at the very least, there is hope. and that's a good way to restart life.