Station Eleven

Paperback, 352 pages

Published by HarperAvenue.

ISBN:
978-1-4434-3486-7
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1 star (1 review)

One snowy night Arthur Leander, a famous actor, has a heart attack onstage during a production of "King Lear." Jeevan Chaudhary, a paparazzo-turned-EMT, is in the audience and leaps to his aid. A child actress named Kirsten Raymonde watches in horror as Jeevan performs CPR, pumping Arthur's chest as the curtain drops, but Arthur is dead. That same night, as Jeevan walks home from the theater, a terrible flu begins to spread. Hospitals are flooded and Jeevan and his brother barricade themselves inside an apartment, watching out the window as cars clog the highways, gunshots ring out, and life disintegrates around them. Fifteen years later, Kirsten is an actress with the Traveling Symphony. Together, this small troupe moves between the settlements of an altered world, performing Shakespeare and music for scattered communities of survivors. Written on their caravan, and tattooed on Kirsten's arm is a line from Star Trek: "Because …

10 editions

Review of 'Station Eleven' on 'Storygraph'

1 star

I downloaded this book from Kindle on Amazon's recommendation. I have never been so sorry to do so.

Station Eleven is an apocalypse novel in which none of the characters worry about food, clothing, or shelter. It is based around an actor who dies on stage during King Lear, and the various people who are associated with that person, including his first wife, who privately draws a comic book called Station Eleven, which is read by some of the younger people in the book.

There are few things I find unforgivable in a book, but excessive nostalgia and sentimentality are amongst them. Station Eleven is roughly 50% characters reminicing about their pasts, and when it isn't alluding to the past it's alluding to the near future where they're all dead. It's the same trick, every time, all the time. Multiple times from the same perspective. At first I was shocked, …