Elena Ferrante (pseudonym), 2011
translated by Ann Goldstein, 2012
the sixty-sixth book in the visitor recommendation series;
suggested by Mark Kersteen
This book is set in southern Italy shortly after World War II. It’s a violent place: boys throw rocks at girls and draw blood, fathers throw disobedient daughters out the window and leave them with broken bones, men beat their wives, men fight each other, and sometimes these disputes escalate all the way to murder. The story focuses on two girls growing up in this milieu: Elena, by putting in a lot of hard work, becomes one of the few students of either sex to get good enough grades to make it into middle school, while her frenemy Lila does even better academically without much effort, but Lila’s father forces her into the family shoemaking business after elementary school. And that is pretty much where I stopped, because I was about a hundred pages in already, didn’t much like the characters, and didn’t particularly care what happened next.
Emily St. John Mandel, 2014
the sixty-seventh book in the visitor recommendation series;
suggested by Eric Kong
I did read all of this one. Its central event is a pandemic (“the Georgia Flu”) that is said to have wiped out 99.99% of the population, meaning that fewer than a million living people remain on the planet. Basically, take the population of Denver—not the metro area, just the people living within the city limits—and spread it out across the surface of the earth. I’ve read a lot of post-apocalyptic stories in my time, but this one reminded me of two in particular. One was The Folk of the Fringe by Orson Scott Card, which I read in college, and which has a long chapter focusing on a troupe of actors who travel among the post-apocalyptic settlements putting on shows; here much of the action focuses on a troupe of musicians who not only perform classical music but stage Shakespeare plays. The other was Severance by Ling Ma, which I read—I was going to say “just recently”, but I see it was at the end of 2020, i.e., more than five years ago now. Yipes. Anyway, that one bounces back and forth between the post-apocalyptic struggle and the story of one survivor’s pre-apocalyptic life, and we see something similar here. Station Eleven veers from action/adventure sequences among the ruins, with members of the “Traveling Symphony” hunted by a self-declared prophet’s cult, to vignettes from the life of a Canadian actor and a handful of people in his orbit before the pandemic. Why him, especially considering that he does not survive (and actually dies in the first chapter, not of the flu, but an unrelated heart attack)? Maybe because five people connected to him do survive, which is statistically unlikely unless he had fifty thousand associates.
When I finished the book I thought that it was a good page-turner yet wasn’t sure I had much of anything to say about it, but I guess maybe that does bring up something. It feels like this book’s “wow” moments come when characters, or sometimes just the readers, discover unlikely connections: here’s one character holding a gun to the head of another, and it just so happens that, unbeknownst to each other, they happen to be the recipients of the only two copies of an ambitious comic book, to which both of them deeply bonded! Here’s one of those characters finally making it to her destination, the “Museum of Civilization”, and it just so happens that the proprietor had once been the best friend of the guy who gave her that comic book! You can be impressed with the precise engineering of the clockwork, but a clockwork universe doesn’t feel real.
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