Blooga lukee Emily St. John Mandelinin "Station Eleven"

Lukutehtävä 15.5.-14.6.2025

1. Lue jokin Emily St. John Mandelin kirja.

(Ei sisällä spoilereita!)

    Kirjoitan nää mun ajatukset englanniksi koska luin ton "Station Eleven" kirjan sillä kielellä, mut tässä on TL:DR suomeksi: se oli kauniisti kirjoitettu, kirjan maailma ja hahmot tuntuu eloisalta, plus tän lukeminen koronan jälkeen oli... mielenkiintoinen kokemus.

“I stood looking over my damaged home and tried to forget the sweetness of life on Earth.”

    I went into this without even reading the blurb and, oh boy, was that a good decision. The reveal that the book was centred around a pandemic destroying modern civilisation was a fantastic record scratch moment. I initially expected this to veer more into horror, so I was a bit disappointed when I realised the focus was more on the interpersonal. But I quickly got over myself when I saw just how good the writing was.

“She was thinking about the way she’d always taken for granted that the world had certain people in it, either central to her days or unseen and infrequently thought of. How without any one of these people the world is a subtly but unmistakably altered place, the dial turned just one or two degrees.”

    The arrival of the pandemic in this book was way faster and more apocalyptic than Covid-19 but it reminded me of how fucking weird it actually was living through though that first year of lockdown. Avoiding big gatherings and doing everything from home became routine soon enough, and books written about a global pandemic before The Pandemic™ are fascinating to reflect on. 

“Hell is the absence of the people you long for.”

    The writing itself captures the humanity of everyone and the world itself wonderfully. There's emotional weight to almost everything, ESPECIALLY the parts describing the transition from modern life to life after the pandemic. There is a chapter early on describing that transition titled "An incomplete list". Here are the first few paragraphs from that chapter:

    No more diving into pools of chlorinated water lit green from below. No more ball games played out under floodlights. No more porch lights with moths fluttering on summer nights. No more trains running under the surface of cities on the dazzling power of the electric third rail. No more cities. No more films, except rarely, except with a generator drowning out half the dialogue, and only then for the first little while until the fuel for the generators ran out, because automobile gas goes stale after two or three years. Aviation gas lasts longer, but it was difficult to come by.

    No more screens shining in the half-light as people raise their phones above the crowd to take pictures of concert states. No more concert stages lit by candy-colored halogens, no more electronica, punk, electric guitars.

    No more pharmaceuticals. No more certainty of surviving a scratch on one's hand, a cut on a finger while chopping vegetables for dinner, a dog bite.

    No more flight. No more towns glimpsed from the sky through airplane windows, points of glimmering light; no more looking down from thirty thousand feet and imagining the lives lit up by those lights at that moment. 

    The nonlinear presentation of the story reminds me of One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez in the best way possible. I love how well the book connects the characters.  The rich tapestry of all these lives weaving together and drifting apart over and over again through well more than 20 years hits hard and rings true in some special way that helps me appreciate how brief our time on earth is and how precious that makes the time we spend together. 

    The last 50 or so pages of this book were beautiful, to say the least. Finding books you can emotionally connect with is such a precious experience, and I'm beyond delighted I gave this one a chance. 

“A fragment for my friend--

If your soul left this earth I would follow and find you

Silent, my starship suspended in night”