I didn’t see the matter-of-fact presentation of Frank’s death as “coldness” or lack of emotional bonds. I saw it as a realistic portrayal of the way one person’s death becomes almost an afterthought when all hell is breaking loose around you.
To borrow a line from Macbeth: “She should have died hereafter/There would have been time for such a word.”
So true. I expected something to happen between Kirsten and August when they were thrown together. But nope. They just survive and get to the airport together. For some reason that Forster’s phrase kept nagging at me. “Only connect.”
I noticed Miranda’s name too - but had not thought of the double “brave new world” connection. I like it.
I like the matter-of-fact presentation of Frank’s death. I think Frank approaches his death in a matter-of-fact way and expects the same of Jeevan. The lack of coldness - the emotion - comes with Jeevan’s interactions with his son Little Frank:
@ignatius, the paperweight had been weighing on me (sorry 
), and eureka!, I found the reason it was nagging at the back of my brain–why it made me think of futuristic dystopia: There is a similar paperweight in George Orwell’s 1984. The hero, Winston Smith, “buys a paperweight in an antique store in the prole district that comes to symbolize his attempt to reconnect with the past.” (Spark Notes)
I looked up the passage (1984 is free online):
From Station Eleven:
I remember thinking there wouldn’t be much room for beautiful but useless things in that life.
Oh good catch. That had to have been on purpose. I did wonder about that paperweight. I thought it amusing that Miranda gave her both the paperweight and (indirectly) the comic books.
Mary: Post #163 - perfect.
(May I add that you have vast knowledge regarding post-apocalyptic books: 1984, The Stand, The Road, Alas, Babylon. Like Jeevan, you probably know how to prepare.)
(May I also recommend The Dog Stars by Peter Heller, if you haven’t read it yet.)
My kids accuse me of being a doomsday prepper. We have a deep freeze and I have a closet of extra stuff I keep on hand when I see stuff on sale. We live in a more rural area and it’s just easier to me to not have to make an hour trip because I ran out of syrup or rice wine vinegar. But we do joke - when the end of the world comes we’ll be able to eat steak and drink wine for a month before the zombies get us. I get nervous when I run low on wine.
I think the book is set so far down the road from the flu because it’s past all the initial things that would likely wipe out a lot of people. The food and water is figured out, society is restructuring. We can just see how a society could possibly move forward once they got to the acceptance point, and art has returned again.
I didn’t see the Frank situation as chilling either. This was more matter of fact than a grab for the tissue box kind of book.
If I was stuck in that situation I’d hope to be living where Jeevan has set up. I wouldn’t want to be in the symphony, I’d think that would be too dangerous, and I wouldn’t want to live in an airport. Did anyone ever see the movie The Village? I didn’t care for it, but I did like the beginning part of it showing how they lived in this small village making it on their own. They also didn’t tell the children who were born in there that there was a world and a history outside, but many still were curious about the world beyond them.
Excellent find Mary13! Amazing memory! It fits perfectly.
Miranda from The Tempest.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miranda_(The_Tempest)
( the link is not taking you to Shakespeare page , you have to click from list to get to page ;(
I thought the paperweight was a symbolic anchor to the past for Kirsten. It weighted her backpack down as a constant reminder.
I love the Miranda/Shakespeare connection.
I gave my son The Dog Stars for Christmas, in hopes that he’d leave it behind until his next break (no time for pleasure reading at school). He did just that, so it’s the next book on my reading list. Gift gifting at our house requires some diabolical planning on my part.
Sadly, I don’t think my love of post-apocalyptic fiction would do me any practical good should the need arise. Those who can survive the Apocalypse, do. Those who can’t, read about it (and then are eaten by zombies).
I agree with SJCM 100% about the burning issue of Frank’s death. In a better, longer book Frank would have been a person instead of a plot device. I feel that we should have gotten to know him and been sad when he died.
Currently I am reading a book by Hermann Hesse that has long descriptions of the characters’ inner feelings. Every few pages, there is a sentence that is so beautiful and poignant that my eyes fill up…
I certainly don’t think every book needs to affect the reader the way the Hesse book is affecting me. However, when there is a sad event in a story and the author fails to write about it in such a way that one’s feelings are stirred, it strikes me as a failing.
Which Hesse? I’ve always meant to read him in German, but so far only read The Glass Bead Game in college in English which I loved.
Ooh mathmom, a further opportunity to speak of Hesse. I read him in German in college! It was a little short novel called Knulp (Drei Geschichten aus dem Leben Knulps). The text was edited slightly to make it easier for second year college students and there was a dictionary in the back with vocabulary the reader might not know.
Knulp was absolutely one of the most beautiful things I have ever read in any language. Later, I read Demian and I think Siddhartha in English (back in the counterculture years when everyone was reading them), and they had nowhere near the impact on me that the exquisite Knulp in German did.
I have no idea how good your German is, mathmom, but if by any remote chance you would like to read the very same lovely edited edition of Knulp that I did, I found it online. It is $19 in hardback from Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/Geschichten-Knulps-Oxford-Library-German/dp/B000VGC0QU
I always intended to revisit Hesse, but I never did until now. I am reading Narcissus and Goldmund as part of a challenge for my other book club where you pledge to read books corresponding to certain categories that the club sets.
I have both the German and the English versions of the book. I thought I would try to read the German with the English version at my elbow, but the unedited German text was too hard for me. I could hardly find two sentences in a row that I could understand without having to look up words!
So now I am reading the English edition with the German edition at my elbow to see how Hesse expresses certain things in German.
A friend of mine also loved Das Glasperlenspiel and said it was his favorite Hesse.
Hope this is not too OT for the rest of the group. Conceivably it might be of some interest to someone. 
What I have been mulling over is just how many people actually survived. The earth has a population of about 7 billion. If the virus kills roughly 99.99%, that would leave about 700,000 people remaining. However, there have to be some pockets of people who don’t come in contact with the virus. Delano Island could be an example of that. So, I would think that there would be more than that who survived.
Also, when do the cars that contain the corpses get moved? How long could the virus survive in a dead person?
In addition to those at the Severn City Airport, there is another pocket of secluded characters in the story who survive—a small team of sales associates on a retreat, one of whom Jeevan marries (Daria):
I would guess that Mandel’s imaginary virus doesn’t survive very long in a dead person; if it did, those who missed the first round of infection would likely succumb after exposure to a dead body—and there had to be so many bodies! Ben, Jeevan’s companion on the road, mentions that he lost his girlfriend, his parents and his two sisters, and that “He’d dug five graves in his backyard” (p. 192). Not every survivor would be capable of such a task. I’d have to think there were hospitals, cars and homes loaded with abandoned corpses that remained forever untouched (like the family in the house Kirsten and August found). Not a pretty thought.
The thought of 99.99% of the population dying and corpses decomposing is quite overwhelming and also disease promoting. 700,000 people worldwide is not very many. It makes me think the book has too many populated settlements in the US…and it’s just a small area of the US. I don’t remember the details of the 99.99 number. It had to just be someone’s guess. How would they know? What about remote tribes in Africa and other places. It seems they would all survive.
And thinking more about the 700,000 people who survived…there would surely be enough food for them right at first…and beuase the flu took literally everyone, there’s no reason to think that any of the survivalists types would have made it…just a collection of unrelated people…all grasping at a future. I think in the early months, the folks at the airports raided more restaurants for canned food etc (and didn’t one of them have a motorcycle for a couple of years?) and then likely picked up books on surviving and planted crops (referred to) for the later years…
Excellent point!!
Good question. Probably only a few weeks at the most.I found a website that talks about the HIV virus and it says about sixteen days.