I finished Emily St. John Mandel’s ‘Station Eleven’ this week. Really enjoyed it. A dystopian novel with some nice people.

There are 4 or 5 main characters that are tied together through 20 years, tied back to the night it all began. And St.John Mandel does it really well. Little clues like the name of the dog, Luli. What are the chances? The intersection of Kirsten, Jeevan and Arthur. It held the book together.

I like books with characters you come to like, or at least come to care about what comes next for them. This book has that.

And I like books with a positive message. This book sort of has that. As compared say to Cormac McCarthy’s ‘The Road’. Finishing that book was painful.

I didn’t understand howTyler could go so bad, and I would have liked to know. But then I am not sure how the good characters went and stayed good.

And a few of the plot elements didn’t quite work, like believing that nobody at the airport was exposed to the flu. Or that such a devastating flu could not be caught, like ebola or Sars was before it. But never the less, I enjoyed it. Well worth a read, and I will look at reading other books by the author.

I finished reading Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises last night.
Spoiler alert: I am going to discuss the plot, characters and themes as though I have read the book. And I didn’t like it.
About half way through the book I nearly put it down. The characters are mostly horrible people. I was struggling to find a reason to keep reading. I actually read a couple of reviews, and they raved about this as Hemingway’s break out novel and that it was a novel that came to epitomize that ‘Lost Generation’. So I stuck with it. I was hopeful the nihilistic characters would learn, would grow and would become better people. It doesn’t happen.
I worked in a bar while in University. I learned about myself that I don’t really like being around drunks if I am not drinking myself. Well this book was about being around drunks all the time. They were either drinking, planning on where to drink, getting over the affects of drinking or behaving poorly while drunk. One character, Jake, calls Brett, the woman he loves, ‘a drunk’. They are all drunks.
But worst than drunks they are terrible people. Lady Brett has sex with every main character. They use and abuse others. They toss people aside like disposable possessions. None of them display any empathy or even decency.
I suppose the elite that like this book find it thoughtful and edgy. But just as Mike tries to be edgy by being mean and rude to Cohn, so most of this book is just rude.
Why the narrator, Jake, was made to be impotent has me scratching my head. He certainly lacks self awareness. But at least he has a job. Most of these characters are unemployed bums.
I am at the point where I read books as a writer, looking for what the writer does and how she accomplishes things. The prose is nice and tight. Some of the descriptions are beautiful. A lot of the action they observe is great. But they just observe, they never engage. And I found I got sick of how ‘Swell’ everything was.
A while ago I re-read Hemingway’s short story ‘Hills like White Elephants’. It is a wonderful piece. But the man in that story could be one of the characters in this book. He probably is. And he sucks.