Emily St. John MandelReseñas

Loved it. Want to connect all her characters with her other books.

Tamer? Than her other books, still lovely, less unusual themes, interesting how all the dramatic moments in the plot take place outside the narrative.

Loved it. Love her.

If you want to read a great post-virus/apocalyptic scenario book... The 5th Wave is fantastic. It handles the flashbacks better; it is written at a faster pace, with engaging characters.

This book introduces you to interesting characters and then does little with it, letting each of them peter out to an unsatisfying, awkward ending. Though this book is much more socio-political than The 5th Wave, yet it is only observational, with a long narrative structure and no real conclusions to be drawn.

An audacious, darkly glittering novel set in the eerie days of civilization’s collapse—the spellbinding story of a Hollywood star, his would-be savior, and a nomadic group of actors roaming the scattered outposts of the Great Lakes region, risking everything for art and humanity.

Kirsten Raymonde will never forget the night Arthur Leander, the famous Hollywood actor, had a heart attack on stage during a production of King Lear. That was the night when a devastating flu pandemic arrived in the city, and within weeks, civilization as we know it came to an end.

Twenty years later, Kirsten moves between the settlements of the altered world with a small troupe of actors and musicians. They call themselves The Traveling Symphony, and they have dedicated themselves to keeping the remnants of art and humanity alive. But when they arrive in St. Deborah by the Water, they encounter a violent prophet who will threaten the tiny band’s existence. And as the story takes off, moving back and forth in time, and vividly depicting life before and after the pandemic, the strange twist of fate that connects them all will be revealed.

This book was originally published in 2014 and given events since, it becomes even more relevant and moving. Beautifully written, it sparkles with imagination and is a thoroughly enjoyable read. Poignant without being melancholy, it skillfully mixes hope with despair.
https://quizlit.org/5-dark-dystopian-novels-for-the-21st-century

Free flowing and short novel on themes of time travel, pandemics, and the nature of reality. I enjoyed the speculation about planetary colonization and time travel, as well as how the characters connected through an "anomaly" in space and time. However most of the important questions raised in the book remain unanswered and I found myself wanting more when I reached the last page.

I just finished Station Eleven and I tried to pick up another book to read but I couldn’t. I really enjoyed this book and now I need some time to process and let the book swirl in my mind and in my heart for a bit. To me that is a sign of a great book. It doesn’t happen often.

I usually shy away from post-apocalyptic stories as they can be too depressing but this book didn’t do that. There were times that were dark and times that were light. They balanced each other out

One of the things I really enjoyed about the telling of this story is the way the different people, different places and different times wove throughout the book. It was like a master weaver was telling the story. Each thread was in place and in harmony with the others. Some threads were more important to the story but the rest were also needed to hold the story in place. I like how the story ended with it still on the loom. More could still be woven and I wanted to see how the pattern continued to develop.

I really want to see and enjoy the Station Eleven comic book. I want to read the story and see the pictures.

This is a VERY short, unusual piece of work. It is set in four different time frames, early 20th century British Columbia, roughly present-day New York City, 23rd century moon colony and 25th century Time Institute.

The different threads are pulled together through the presence of a time traveler from the 25th century named Gaspary. Gaspary is recruited to work at the Time Institute to investigate what is essentially a “glitch in the Matrix”. As you might imagine, time travel is very strictly regulated in order to prevent corruption of the time line, which any reader of time travel genre can appreciate. Unfortunately, or not, Gaspary is not as meticulous in this regard as his overseers would like.

As stated, this is a very short work, easily consumable in a single sitting (3-4 hours), which is probably wise, given the complexity of the subject matter. The payoff is pretty decent and makes the effort worthwhile,

I am forever changed

LOVED!!!

Loved, loved, loved this book!!! Such a fantastic world that this author has created and such a gorgeous story. A favorite.

Sea of tranquility.
This is a speculative fiction story of time travel across several centuries.
The main character Gaspery is the one who time travels and his job is to investigate characters in the past. His sister Zoey works at the Time Institute, a government body that controls time travel. She pulls some strings and gets him the job. The only rule is that he cannot alter the path a person in the past or future can take.
I was not a fan of this book. I found it confusing and hard to follow.

Emily St. John Mandel is a clever writer. The plot builds slowly but steadily, with built in expectations along the way.

Each flashback comes at just the right place to show something the reader needs to know about a character. And every character, even the few minor ones, seems to be there for a reason.

I put this book on a to-read list, somehow thinking it was science fiction, but by the time I realized it wasn't I was into it and happily read to the end.

This is a book I wanted to fall in love with but it never actually happened, even though there were some promising parts. It started really strongly only to kind of fizzle out as I progressed. If this hadn't been so overhyped I would have probably given up. I kept waiting for something to turn everything around and make reading worthwhile.

Sea of Tranquility deals with the themes of plague/pandemic a lot and this just felt forced to me, so much that it feels like another cash-in pandemic novel. No matter that this is a book about time travel, it is trying to be mostly about this moment in time. I can appreciate the intention, but it didn't offer enough substance for that to carry the whole story.

The structure of seemingly unrelated timelines/stories coming together reminded me too much of Cloud Atlas, even some themes and motifs were exactly the same. But, this is messy and underdeveloped. Also, in this time-traveling novel that talks about the future - the future is just way too similar to the past. It came across as lazy writing, to disregard the historical setting to that extent (the first timeline was the only one that delivered).

To put it simply, this was not good enough to be good literary fiction, and it didn't have any elements of a decent science fiction. I don't really see the point of it, except for it to be a pandemic novel with meta references to other novels of this author, a filler that reads like a first draft.

One thing I enjoyed was the feeling of serenity that permeates this novel. There is also a very good sense of place, bringing back my memories of Vancouver Island.

3.5 stars.

This is too complicated for me. I had the feeling I need to make notes to keep on the right track. I had the impression that there were a few glitches in the time-plot-structure, but probably it was just me not following...
After the last two, what I need now is a character novel. Less action, fewer dimensions, less apocalypse, more profund characters.

Mandel’s fifth novel feels delightfully familiar in terms of its style. Like her previous novels the prose is elegant and precise, the story nonlinear and mosaic. Also familiar are two of the characters from her previous novel Station Eleven, brought back I think to advance one of the novel’s themes: the permeability of boundaries between one sort of life and another.

Vincent, the closest here to a main character, moves from poverty into the “kingdom of money”, in which one city or country looks much like another because the wealth creates a uniform appearance. She moves from a life on land to a life on sea, as a cook on one of those massive shipping vessels, touching land only every nine months. She moves from life to a ghostly world, appearing to her brother thousands of miles away, slipping easily away.

Jonathan Alkaitis hires Vincent to play his wife. He runs a Madoff style Ponzi scheme. Finally arrested and jailed when it collapses, he moves between prison and a “counterlife” in which he escaped to Dubai before discovery. This counterlife, as well as a ghostly life in which some of his dead defrauded investors appear to him in the prison yard, increasingly take over his reality from the “real” one of his prison cell.

Leon Prevant, shipping executive and pandemic flu victim in Station Eleven, becomes in the parallel universe of The Glass Hotel, Leon Prevant, shipping executive and defrauded investor. In one version of reality he dies in a pandemic, in another, the pandemic never happens. In one version of reality he never meets Jonathan Alkaitis, in another, he gives Alkaitis his life savings and spends his retirement years in an RV working odd menial jobs, discovering the “shadow country” he only glimpsed out of the corner of his eye as a corporate executive, always looking away.

It goes further - one of Alkaitis’ assistants thinks about fleeing but doesn’t, while another does and creates an alternate life in Mexico under an alternate name. Why did one of them flee and one stay to accept his fate? Or better said, one of his possible fates, instead of another?

Many different kinds of lives are possible for us, and the boundaries between them may be thinner than we think. Just look.

Once upon a time, in far more primitive days, people connected to the internet through 56k modems. Remember those? Waiting for a picture to download could try the patience of typical modern man. An ingenious approach to dealing with this problem was interlacing. Rather than downloading from top to bottom strictly sequentially, an interlaced image was divided up into strips 8 pixels high and downloaded onto your screen in passes. The first pass downloaded only the top line of each strip, the second pass downloaded another line, the next pass downloaded more lines, and the final pass downloaded the rest. In this way each section of the image was progressively made clearer and fully visible through multiple passes through it: a fuzzy whole made sharp while you waited for the complete image.

The Singer's Gun reminded me of watching one of these picture files download back in those days before broadband. It is a novel that does not progress from start to finish along a chronological line, each step along the timeline clearly presented before moving along. Instead we see a fuzzy outline of the whole, and take more passes back through sections of the story, making them gradually clearer, and in fact changing our perception of the image. It's a great alternative way to shape a novel, and it works terrifically well with this book.

Other than that, I'll note that in her second novel Mandel has again created a central character who finds himself living outside the bounds of the law, but forced there more or less unwillingly out of circumstance. As in her debut novel Last Night in Montreal, it's just that there were two options presented, and as it happened the only option really to be taken was the one that leads to being chased by an officer of the law.

When I was a teenager my family took a trip up to Quebec on vacation one year. I came back home with a t-shirt that I often wore for many years that bore the province's motto - "Je me souviens", meaning "I remember". A touch ironic for me, not only because I refused to use any of my embarrassing high school level French while we were there, but also because I did not remember those French speaking Acadian ancestors of mine who were expelled from Canada after the British conquest in the 18th century and who were forced to flee to Louisiana. I found that history out later.

It's also ironic for one of the main characters in this fantastic debut novel. Lilia was abducted by her father from his ex-wife when she was seven. She does not remember her life in the small Quebec town near the American border before the abduction. She does not remember why she has these scars on her arms. She does not remember her mother. She does not remember why her half-brother tells her "never come home". She and her father spend the next nine years fleeing from Quebec - always traveling, changing names, hiding from discovery. It's an anxious way to live and grow up.

But she never felt at ease in the world. It couldn't be claimed that she was really a part of it, and from the specific night when her memories began (ice against window, lost bunny, snow), the traditions of the world were foreign to her. She picked up what she could from books and television shows, noting carefully the existence of two-parent families, houses, schools, family dogs, memorizing intriguingly home-specific phrases like latchkey kid and back garden and state-of-the-art kitchen appliances and basement. She moved over the surface of life the way figure skaters move, fast and choreographed, but she never broke through the ice, she never pierced the surface and descended into those awful beautiful waters, she was never submerged and she never learned to swim in those currents, these currents: all the shadows and light and splendorous horrors that make up the riptides of life on earth.

Then as a young woman she receives a letter from Montreal - come and I will tell you what you don't remember. It's information wanted for information to give. There will be remembering and wishing for never knowing. One person will emerge okay. One person will not. One person will be spun out by the chaotic turbulence unleashed.

Ultimately for me it's a sad novel, but well worth reading. I really felt for all of the characters in these pages; add to that success the wonderful writing and I was completely hooked into this one.

This is a marvelous book. I feel like I did last year after I read [b:The Son|16240761|The Son|Philipp Meyer|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1355349098s/16240761.jpg|19110442]: it's going to take some beating for this not to be the best book I read this year. I've read and really liked all three of Mandel's previous books, and now this one soars to an even higher level.

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

Current day is Year 20. Twenty years after a new swine flu variant swept over the Earth with a 99.9% fatality rate. Things have mostly settled down in what used to be the upper midwest, survivors living in small settlements among the decay and wreckage of human civilization. The Traveling Symphony, motto "Survival is Insufficient", moves through its territory like the old circuit riders, performing Shakespeare plays and classical music with its band of about thirty members.

We have been lost for so long. We long only for the world we were born into.

Kirsten Raymonde is the link between the Symphony, Year 20, and the life of Arthur Leander, star of screen and stage, who died on Day Zero, in front of this child actor. The novel moves back and forth between Arthur's life and, later, Kirsten's, with more links rising to the surface as the novel crescendos in a violent confrontation involving Kirsten and the Prophet, leader of a violent religious cult who alternates quoting from the Book of Revelation and a comic called Station Eleven.

Mandel has always combined interesting and thoughtful plots and structure with richly drawn characters who provoke great empathy from the reader. This she does again. It feels as if this world and these people are actually out there, still existing. Just a terrific, terrific novel.

Dr. Eleven: What was it like for you, at the end?
Captain Lonagan: It was exactly like waking up from a dream.

I love reading Mandel, although this one feels kind of slight to me. Sort of like an unnecessary coda to The Glass Hotel, and which might well not exist were it not for the COVID-19 pandemic. It continues The Glass Hotel’s theme of alternate possible lives, albeit approached differently this time through the conceit of time travel, making the theme more conventional sci-fi action and less literary fiction musing. It also continues with several of The Glass Hotel’s characters, which seems unnecessary except that Mandel may have found going back to them a comfort during lockdowns and social distancing.

The fact that one of the new characters in this book is a novelist famous for writing a pandemic novel and who goes on book tour talking about what it’s like to have written a pandemic novel - as an actual pandemic begins - is another reason for thinking this book wouldn’t exist except for Mandel living through the time of COVID-19, after writing Station Eleven. It gives her a chance to reflect directly on her own experiences, obviously, which is pretty interesting in fact but doesn’t actually have anything to do with the plot here.

The plot: it doesn’t make sense to me. The anomaly only exists because a character went back in time to investigate the anomaly. But he wouldn’t have gone back in time to investigate the anomaly and thus create the anomaly unless the anomaly had already happened. At least that’s how my logic works. Also the time traveler makes a huge life-altering decision which I’m not sure I buy without having more characterization to understand him. He makes it too casually. I would need more time inside his head before I could accept this.

I found this somewhat disappointing, then, but still, it’s an Emily St. John Mandel novel. Still worth reading! The character of Edwin St. John St. Andrew we begin the novel with is great, wouldn’t mind a novel on him. The reflections on being a pandemic novelist were interesting. And the engagement with the theory that we’re living inside a simulation was thought-provoking. Lines like this are part of the joy of reading Mandel:

This, I found myself thinking in the years that followed, on nights when my wife and I played the violin together, when we cooked together, when we walked in our fields watching the movements of the farm robots, when we sat on the porch watching the airships rise up like fireflies on the horizon over Oklahoma City, this is what the Time Institute never understood: if definitive proof emerges that we’re living in a simulation, the correct response to that news will be So what. A life lived in a simulation is still a life.

This is a really well told speculative fiction account that starts in Toronto during a snow storm. An influenza virus brought to Toronto on a flight from Moscow (the Georgia flu) wipes out the majority of the people on earth within hours of exposure.
This is the story of those who survive and rebuild their lives during the decades after the big event.
The main character, middle aged Arthur Leander is acting as King Lear when he suffers a heart attack and dies on the stage. His life as a stage actor and then Hollywood movie star forms the background story for the remaining characters as every main character was a small or large part of his life.
Those who survive the pandemic are left without modern technology, no Internet, electricity, water, agriculture and security. They survive by banding together, ensuring the security and well being of others and finding small pleasures that make their lives worth living. The author does a remarkable job of tying up all the loose ands and character connections by the end. It has a hopeful ending.

I love this author’s work so much that I was just happy to read another book by her. While it was interesting, it’s definitely not her best. A quartet of high school musicians find their paths crossing 10 years later. One is a struggling journalist, another a gambling addict, another a drug addict, another on the run for stealing money, etc. Switching back-and-forth in time and POV became very convoluted, and it was hard to feel connected to any of the characters with the constant shuffle. Despite the plot, the descriptions of the oppressive Florida heat and the nostalgia for the past are beautifully written, and great indicators of the author’s skill. Read it if you are a completist for her work, but otherwise start with Station Eleven.

“The point was that Gavin had opened a door, cracked it slightly, and he could see through to the disgrace and shadows on the other side. If you tell a lie it’s easier to tell another. And abyss yawns suddenly at your feet.”½

3.5

Such a strange and dreamy book. I lost steam in the middle and turned my attention elsewhere but when I returned I zoomed through and that is giving me pause when it comes to the ratings. I had a hard time connecting the dots at first and was waiting for the true plot to emerge but eventually I realized that this wasn’t really about the plot so much as it was about atmosphere and feelings.

When I finished I immediately returned to the beginning a reread some pages and that wrapped things up nicely for me.

Looking forward to watching a recorded session with the author from when she did a virtual event with my local bookstore.

Purchased because I really enjoyed Station Eleven.

I was reluctant to read this because I'm really very tired of dystopia and this particular book had a lot of hype among my friends and I was afraid I would be disappointed. Not so!

I really enjoyed the construction of the book because I love both time shifts and unknowingly interconnected characters. I found the whole story compelling but could have done without the "bad guy" because I felt as if collapse of civilization was enough of a story. The twist there was pretty well telegraphed too, in my opinion.

I loved the Station Eleven comics element and would love to really see them. Reading about them often made me think back to The Painter and I find that particularly interesting because so many others were reminded of the Dog Stars by this book.

Another author for me to read more of!

4.5. My third thoroughly enjoyable go at post-apocalyptic pandemic fiction during our current pre-apocalyptic pandemic reality.