I agree: I don’t think forgetting would be possible or even for the best. No need to reinvent the wheel … use the past as a springboard.
Dumb but I really felt for the traveling symphony member who lost (or broke) his glasses. I think I’d miss that and medications most. (Kirsten’s brother died from an infection that antibiotics could have cured.)
@eyemamom, I also wondered why there wasn’t more progress in 20 years. I guess too much of the population was gone. I’m sure settlements were influenced by the professions of the people that inhabited them. I kept hoping there would be an engineer at the airport who would figure out how to generate electricity.
I didn’t think it was implausible that humanity had made such little progress since the flu, considering the absence of communication, usable gasoline, electricity, etc. I thought Mandel laid out a scenario that made humanity’s dire situation likely. It was rewarding when Kirsten looked through the telescope at the town with electric lights, but I almost thought that was a little implausible (though I was glad to see the book ending that way).
Chapter 6, “An Incomplete List,” details the many things there are to miss. It reminded me immediately of Emily’s famous speech in “Our Town” that says goodbye to clocks ticking, hot baths, new-ironed dresses, etc., and ends by asking if anyone ever appreciates how wonderful life is, every minute. One of my favorite chapters in the book - another being Chapter 10, that outlines all the ways the people in the Symphony annoyed each other. That one resonates!
I have to go back and read these very thoughtful posts and the questions, but I have a question that might be really unimportant but has bugged me since reading-- after Arthur is given the two volumes of the comic book near the end of the book (two weeks before his death? A little before?), later, he talks to his son on the phone and asks him about the comic books he sent him (setting up the fact that Tyler knows the books at the end). How did Arthur get those? He gave his own copies to Kirsten, yes? And the books were not really published in a large way, right? How did he know about them? How did he get them? Am I overfocused on something trivial?
^^^ I agree with frazzled’s post #22 … in its entirety.
@jaylynn, Miranda gives Arthur two copies of each of her completed comic books. Arthur sends one set to Tyler, and the other he gives to Kirsten.
@jaylynn, Miranda gave Arthur 2 copies of Station Eleven. (page 213)
Oops, I just noticed Mary had already answered jaylynn’s question. 
@Caraid, great minds… 
I would guess that different surviving communities made progress at different rates, meaning that a terrified and backward settlement led by someone like the Prophet might exist simultaneously with a small, efficient town that managed to figure out electricity.
Did anyone ever read Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank? It’s a great, gripping read, but requires a little suspension of disbelief as regards how quickly that community pulled itself together. (My son affectionately calls it “Little House on the Apocalypse.”) In that respect, the slow pace of progress in Station Eleven seemed more realistic to me.
At one point, after an encounter with a stranger, the adult Kirsten observes that there was a certain “pleasure of being alive in Year Twenty, this calmer age. For the first ten or twelve years after the collapse, he would have been much more likely to shoot them on sight” (p. 145).
I envisioned the child Kirsten witnessing horrors of the type that the Man and the Boy saw in *The Road/i, which is set in the equivalent of about Year Eight. (Believe me, you don’t want details.)
Ah. Thank you! Don’t know why that was bugging me! I loved the unexpected, fateful connections between characters, and that seemingly unexplained one bothered me. Must read more carefully (she said to herself, for the millionth time in her life.) Gracie.
I loved this too! I couldn’t put it down, and it certainly provided much food for thought. Last summer I listened to *The World Without Us * by Alan Weisman, a non-fiction book about what would happen to the natural and man-made worlds if humans suddenly disappeared. It’s quite shocking to think how quickly many structures made of our own hands would disintegrate, and depressing to see evidence of the useless shells that would be left for ages–all those cars, all the buildings in so much sprawl.
The main character, hmmm, I’d say a toss-up between Kirsten and Arthur, although I’m torn with adding Miranda because she too was involved with setting the scenes of the past and future. Plus, I liked her character
Something I wanted more explanation of was the flu itself. Although it makes a compelling premise for the book, It’s hard to believe that a virus could be so lethal and contagious, especially in such a short time span. Maybe the horrors of such are assumed in Kirsten’s missing year when she would have seen the worst behavior of the human race–hungry, afraid, in a mode of utter survival. But back to the flu, were certain individuals immune, and did others build resistance? Are there examples in any animal species of such a quick and complete annihilation?
Certain individuals are immune. On the fifth day after leaving his apartment, Jeevan runs into three people:
I assume Jeevan to be immune also.
The stretch of belief for me came when no one on Clark’s plane and no one on the other planes already at the airport has the flu. I can believe Clark’s run of luck as that of a single individual but to extend that luck through the other passengers seems a stretch. I do know that one plane lands and no one disembarks. Still the airport contains a goodly number of individuals from all over and no one has the flu?
Great comparison. I saw Our Town on a school field trip when I was about 15 years old. I remember totally losing myself in the play and being devastated by Act III-- but having to act cool and unaffected when the lights came up, so as to not embarrass myself in front of my soulless peers.
Here’s the passage from Thornton Wilder’s play:
You can blame my multiple and meandering posts today on the weather here. We’re snowbound. Can’t get my car out of the garage, but the internet works! View out my window is something like this: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Bx1EKdXY-B0/Uudje3_YSbI/AAAAAAAAClY/XUFQTekPI48/s1600/IMG_2303-SNOW.gif
I thought maybe Jeevan managed to miss the flu because he and Frank had secluded themselves so well, for so long.
Very true about the unusual run of luck for Clark and the others. At least the author acknowledges the unlikelihood, saying that Clark’s trip took place during “the hours of near misses, the hours of miracles” and that he and his fellow passengers were “improbably lucky” (p. 223). Apparently, the Georgia flu did a hop-skip right over the Severn City Airport, which then became a sort of Quarantine Station. I thought the image of the full plane on the tarmac, never opened, was haunting.
^^^ Re Jeevan - He gets exposed when he rushes on stage to aid Arthur. He isolates after the fact but he does have that earlier moment of exposure plus.
Didn’t Arthur die of a heart attack? I don’t think we know if anyone in the theater had the flu yet. That was the first day it arrived in the US.
Mary 13 - my son in Chicago sent pictures, estimating about a foot so far ! Snow day tomorrow ???
Station Eleven was a quite a page turner,and, I too, passed it on. Super selection.
Great questions, Mary13. I read this quickly weeks ago, and have to reread so much. Enjoying everyone’s comments.
Main character- I’m with Ignatius the " all knowing" Clark, although Kristen, as well, seem like main characters to me.
I researched a bit about Miloscz. I love the line “There is too much world”. “Holocaust, surviving, and survivors guilt.”
Loved the interconnectedness, ala Cloud Atlas.
Did the paperweight remind anyone of, Rosebud , from the movie Citizen Kane, " " ?
I’m grateful the author did NOT GO INTO DETAIL about the “forgotten year”. So this was my kind of " sanitized" post apocalyptic book.
But, the plane on the runway…shudders. Awful.
And, big question.
Are we to assume Kristen and the Traveling Symphony, are headed in the direction where Jeevan lives ?
Little confused about that.
Your friendly book club curmudgeon checking in!
I thought the book was unevenly written. I know NewJerseyChessMom agrees with me, because she told me so. NJCM – where are you?!
The short, verbless sentences scattered throughout the text drove me crazy. Near the beginning of the book, there were a couple of overly long, awkward sentences that baffled me, because much of the writing wasn’t that bad.
Here are the things I liked, and the things I didn’t like.
LIKES:
DISLIKES:
Yes. At first, I thought that it would turn out that Arthur was one of the first cases of the flu, but it seemed to genuinely be a heart attack. We learn that many of those in the theater died: “Of all of them there at the bar that night, the bartender was the one who survived the longest. He died three weeks later on the road out of the city” (p. 15). But my impression was that none of them were infected/contagious on the night of the play.
No, I don’t think so. Jeevan is settled in what was Virginia, and Kirsten and the troupe are at the Severn City Airport in Michigan. I think Jeevan’s identity is one piece of the puzzle of her past that Kirsten will never have.
I asked where NJCM was before I saw her post. Hey NJCM, are you gonna back me up about the quality of the writing?
