tob 3/16 Station 11 versus An Untamed State

tob 3/16/ 2015 .... second week (still round one..)


Monday
Emily St John Mandel    Station 11   v     Untamed Heart   Roxane Gay


// am int in St11 bcs apocalypse.  but put off by catalog "about a movie star, his bf, his ex, a traveling post-apoc Shksp group, a villian prophet" / think do want to look at, fr wh said here ----

Excerpt:  Clark had always been fond of beautiful objects, and in his present state of mind, all objects were beautiful. He stood by the case and found himself moved by every object he saw there, by the human enterprise each object had required. Consider the snow globe. Consider the mind that invented those miniature storms, the factory worker who turned sheets of plastic into white flakes of snow, the hand that drew the plan for the miniature Severn City with its church steeple and city hall, the assembly-line worker who watched the globe glide past on a conveyer belt somewhere in China. //this is like wh stirs my terror? (why? why terrifying?) all the human enterprise to make this printed pad of optician prescription paper, I don't understand it ~ cannot imagine it?  do not believe in it? //

Judgemnt:  The apocalypse in Station Eleven is a pretty gentle one .. not ending w cannibalism, gangrene. And because Station Eleven is a post-apocalyptic novel not about those things, it is free to be about other things—the things we’ll miss about that old and ostentatious world, the things we use to rebuild a new one. We can prioritize beauty and comfort, connection and goodness.   //that sounds v int.         
/just hope am not disint by me the ~ cataloged variousness of char, storyline.  traveling players reminds of some other (recent, not Hamlet) book ~ Umberto Eco? no. title came to me: Morality Play.  by Barry Unsworth.  (so I was thinking of the u? plus publ'd 1995, prob same time I was acq w umberto eco, at p&p.  also assoc w salman rushdie.   even contemporariess?  Umberto 1932 Italian.  Unsworth 1930 England.  & rushdie younger 1947 India. /

-There are so many threads in Station Eleven and yet the events don’t overwhelm the bigger story, which is about the power of art as a kind of salvation.

-One of the great pleasures of the book is the anticipation of how the various threads will crisscross and overlap, and the complete trust in the author's ability to make those intersections happen. You do feel taken care of, as judge said.

-RidgewayGirl: I liked that Station Eleven chose to focus on the psychological and emotional results of the pandemic rather than being side-tracked by how one group found a water source or learned to make soap. The logistics in books about post-apocalyptic survival tend to take over and that's why I end up burned out on reading them
-Drew: I realized, probably halfway through, that this was barely an apocalypse novel at all but instead a kaleidoscopic time-jumping serendipity tale /oh. eh.
-Hebe: I agree. I think post-apocalypses have a tendency towards pessimism, as well, and part of the project of Station Eleven is redressing that balance. Like, sure, life will be hard after the apocalypse; but that's not the point. The point is that it will still have meaning. Humans will still be recognisably human, however they're forced to live, and that's the point of the book.

-Tiffany: Station Eleven was a fantastically spun story-well written, well plotted, expertly told-But the lack of realism in the apocalyptic years kept nagging at me. For awhile I was able to ignore them, because I loved the story so much, and I really wasn't reading it as speculative fiction. But I found myself unable to turn off the voices in my head that kept saying things like "Where are all the bicycles?", "How can they possibly be out of ammunition when there are billions of rounds available in 2015?" "And why is everyone living in gas stations and motels when there are apartment buildings and houses available?", "And what about solar chargers? And wind powered generators?" I wanted to turn these voices off, I just couldn't and the more I read, the worse it got.   ...I think what started the whole critical spiral for me was the fact that there were so few people left (.1%) of the population, so mathematically, there would still be so many resources available to them, even after 20 years.  Twenty years doesn't seem like enough time to go through all of the useful items left in the world. There would be something like 200 bikes per person, not to mention antibiotics, soap, ammunition.


-where he's stocking up on cart after cart of supplies at the grocery store; them watching the world stop /? why stop? ppl are dying fr a flu ?  so what makes a sudden stopping?/ from the windows. 

-with masterful shifts in perspective, the book zooms in on one tiny life or zooms out to casually state that commercial air travel would end in two weeks.  //that is int.  premise for even just a story.  how m that wld change lives.  first, the change to it: wld there be a mad rush for ppl to get home or where wanted to be or  with family.   makes me think of the wall going up in Berlin, some persons actually separated from home, bcs out for day, or relatives. /then life when it would be much less easy to get anywhere far, especially across oceans.  / and the change to society! transport of goods.  

-I'm still haunted thinking about the last plane that arrived at the airport, full of people, who never disembarked. //why? again d n think sudden.  that gives image of recent tv show ~ from guy who did movie wh Pan's Labarynth? G del Torro?  w a disease th first appears as a whole plane of ppl dead ~ on tarmac.
-Or the pilot who takes off for California.

-Emily C. I woke up the other morning from long, tortuous dreams about the Georgian Flu and whether I would pack up my family and run or hunker down for the long haul. I woke up debating the merits of our various backpacks, routes to safety, and whether I should bring Station Eleven along as a guide. I'm still worrying about it.  Suffice it to say I was completely caught up in the book and loved the new perspective of the dystopian landscape.   Plus, troupers are wonderful.   //oh Emily C is who said this, th I like: Ah, I'm so disappointed. I loved All the Birds, Singing. The Bookstore, thank you for recommending it since it was my favorite book that I've read in a long while. Jake is a great, strong character, and I loved the pacing of the novel. I read it quickly, in the freezing Maine winter, parked in front of the woodstove, and still can't stop thinking about it. And that ending, man, I didn't think there was any slow burn about it.
-Station Eleven has stuck with me as well. I wanted to discuss it with everyone, and I spent a lot of time thinking about how I would react to that world and whether I would be able to adapt. 
-I know, I wear glasses too! I have a stockpile of contact lenses that I never wear that I decided I'd toss in the bag for backup, though that wouldn't get me very far.
-I love that you are still debating what to do. Station Eleven made me think about "what if" a lot more than other novels dealing with the same topic.  /cool. bcs anyth dealing w this topic wld provoke that./ I think in part it's because you see what happened after the crisis. Where could you go to have the best chance of survival? What do you need? Who do you need?


-ekdumas:  Station Eleven, I really enjoyed! Despite my resistance to post-apoc books these days I found it to be a really beautiful book that resonated and stayed with me for many weeks. Overall I was just really touched what I think is the overarching message of the importance of art and what remains and what a society can continue to latch on to after a giant catastrophe like that.

-drewlynn: I love that Mandel gave a shout out in the acknowledgments to The Passage by Justin Cronin, the book that convinced me to love post-apocalyptic fiction.
-Bill Hughes: Love The Passage! I never read acknowledgements, so I missed that.    /hmm as I highlight to bold that, seems fmlr.  hrd of in cnxxn w sth else? Lost maybe?

-Bill Hughes: I'm disappointed in the judgement, but I'm buoyed by reading all the comments and confirmation that I'm not a monster for preferring Station 11. Yes, Untamed State is "brave" and "raw" and "brutal" and kudos for all that, but wow, Station 11 created an intricate new world. The "survival is not enough" theme underneath it all was just [bonus]. I will admit that at first I was annoyed at the comic-book "device" as something to tie it together, but after a while it just became part of the fabric and I stopped noticing it--or more accurately it stopped pulling me out of the story.

-Brandon: One of the things I loved is the comic in Station Eleven.  I loved the descriptions of our unexpected author plugging away at the illustrations year after year after year, designing new areas. I thought it was a nice parable, these people both in their wrecked worlds, at their twilight, one group desperate to return to how things were, one group steadfast to adapt to these changes and not just survive but thrive. I'm a total sucker for the message of Station Eleven, about the power of art to save lives, to inspire us to better ourselves and our world. I also love the way theater lives continue in the troupe, that subtle and not so subtle jostling for rank, coupling, referring to people by their role.
-I did love the way Station Eleven blended high-low culture, Shakespeare and Star Trek, and gave each equal weight.
--Brandon: Yes! I also think that better reflects how we actually like things. People tend to like both things, and why should we keep them separate?
-I wonder if Mandel's speaking to that high-low division when she has Miranda say about the comic "It doesn't matter if you understand it, it's mine." (My favourite line in the entire book!) It doesn't matter whether we perceive art as high or low; it only matters that it exists, and means something to someone somewhere.    //qstn is not is it sophisticated or not, but is its intensity such that you want to live there / note that whether sophisticated may play into whether want live there.  intensity = means sth to  ~
-Marinus: I did really enjoy the descriptions of the comic.  I wanted more of that, and less of the hollywood has-been.
-Same! I loved Miranda's sections; [those] were the best parts of the book for me.

-I really appreciated that Mandel didn't turn it into a heavy-handed Shakespearian metaphor. The use of Shakespeare in the novel was the same way Shakespeare was used in his time: entertainment and escape from a scary world. And I thought there were some nice parallels. Shakespeare was written during a time when there were really scary plagues sweeping England

-Marinus (Naoko JunDo):  I did enjoy Station Eleven, but it was ultimately disappointing. I was surprised by the amount of critical love it received. Nothing about it felt new to me, and the worlds it attempted to create, past, present, and post-apocalyptic, failed to convince. It reminded me, in an unfortunate way, of Beautiful Ruin, a novel that truly annoyed me for its shorthands and melodrama. I would have preferred that the narrative stay in the post-apocalyptic and not switch perspectives.

-Marinus: I think what's most interesting about end-of-society stories is not how the first generation survives, but what society takes its place three, four, ten generations out.
I recently read Hild, which never made into a TOB but could easily have been a contender last year. In many ways that book, a historical novel set in 9th century Britain, is a post-apocalyptic novel. It's set a few centuries after the collapse of the Roman empire, and the ruins of that empire are still visible, and misunderstood, throughout the successor society which is rebuilding--even as that society has been severely reduced in its forms of government, trade, education, etc (the "radical material simplification" that comes with the fall of empire). There's just kind of a scope and depth there that I want to read in the thought-experiment about a modern collapse.
-Multiple Entendres: Yes! Hild was great. That is a great point about the setting of that novel. I'm also interested in seeing more stories in how society is getting along after it rebuilds a bit. We've seen enough now of at-the-time-of-collapse.

-Marinus: Not one of those survivors knew anything about electricity, plumbing, engineering, construction, agriculture, mining, education, leadership, alternative energy, etc. etc. etc. etc.    -Who needs that when you can recite iambic pentameter?   -Marinus: Iambic pentameter would probably be a useful technology in a radically simplified society, since it's a good aide to memory. Seeing as these survivors had no memory of how to do or reconstruct any other useful technology.

-I was astonished by Station Eleven, because I'd read Mandel's first novel and been deeply unimpressed. /int./ And I don't generally like dystopian apocalyptic post-apocalyptic stuff. I was surprised at how very good it was and how much I loved it.



-Some scenes stood out--mostly at the airport--but I don't think I could have named (or even described) a single character.

-I've noticed that for S11, I remember specific scenes--stocking up on groceries, the ghost plane on the tarmac--and the feeling when I finished, that I wanted to discuss the concepts.
For Untamed State, I don't remember scenes. I feel them.

-Melanie: S11 is a book my family listened to together & it resonated with my Shakespeare-and-spec-fic-loving teen, my orchestra-and-acting-and-science-loving teen, my Shakespeare-and-literature-loving husband, and my omnivorous self. Not a meal of that road trip went by without us talking about what was happening in the plot, what we thought would happen next, which characters we needed to see more of. //.aw that sounds nice, parents and two teens all into a story and talking about it. sounds amazing, really.// When we saw planes in the sky or came into a well-lit city, we all went through a little disconnect to be in our current world.
Untamed State is a book I started last night after dinner and stayed up until 3 to finish. I am still dehydrated now at lunchtime. Reading it was an intense & personal experience and I didn't want anyone else in [there w me]. Even discussing it here today feels intrusive, although being here now was the motivation to read it last night. I don't want to talk about it, but I'm glad it's won.



-caroline pruett:  I enjoyed 'Station Eleven' but I'm not heartbroken it didn't advance (esp because I'll be shocked if it's not a zombie). I thought it was masterfully put together -- even if, much like 'All the Light,' it relies heavily on thematically resonant coincidence. But I kept waiting for an insight that would blow me away/ teach me something new/ convince me that the link between all the disparate parts of the book was essential rather than arbitrary. The fusion with post apocalyptic Shakespeare ( a combination that excites me in theory) felt novel but ultimately arbitrary.

-Drew: The ATLWCS [All the Light.. by Doerr] analogy is interesting, because I immensely enjoyed S11 and was bored by ATLWCS. This is to say: both of those books felt like they were movies-on-the-page. That's not a bad thing, necessarily, but it's a quality that's worth considering when we talk about reading as a specific type of artistic engagement.

-Aaron: I loved Gay's low thread-count style and found it complemented the plot. While initially distracting, the unadorned prose made it impossible for me to hide from the violence depicted in something as superfluous as beautiful words. Trust that it is quite an achievement for a novel to cause me to have a reaction where I refer to beautiful words as superfluous. This cast a stark light on All the Light We Cannot See, which I read immediately after An Untamed State. All The Light's truly great writing distracted me from the pedestrian plot until it couldn't and I became resentful at its hollowness.

-For me, neither book was successful. I had issues with some of the awkward writing in Untamed State--the ending was right out of a Lifetime movie--and I had trouble with Station Eleven's world. I just felt so distant from it, not involved at all.





.......AN UNTAMED STATE

-Kerry: Despite cliches, idealized characters, and fairy tale elements, An Untamed State demands an emotional response and practically wrings compassion out of the reader.  Station Eleven is more like the snow globe, even a well-made one, in that it doesn't ever really do much though it is a pretty thing. I think they had different ambitions, both worthy, and An Untamed State came closer to full attainment even though it was inferior from a purely technical standpoint.

-ekdumas: I don't think anyone can not bomb through this book. The way it is written and the intense violence make it impossible not to turn the pages rapidly, both to find out what happens but also to advance the brutal scenes. However, I could not STAND the main character and mostly the relationship she had with her husband. The "soap opera" dialogue and really everything about that couple rubbed me the wrong way.   .. Too many ugly characters that I could give two shits about, despite the awful things that were happening all around them.    -The writing didn't feel blunt to me.  It felt superficial and it was a distraction that sort of devalued the whole thing for me.

-Kerry:  I think we are muddling things with the nice thread count metaphor. I don't think the dispute /diffrnce/ is btw luxurious prose and sparse prose. /good: clarifying./  Rather, An Untamed State is cliche-ridden, the dialogue is soap-opera-ish (as someone said), and the prose is otherwise unwieldy. Cliches are not a stylistic choice, at least, I have heard no reason why cliched prose helps theme, character, or plot in Untamed in any way. It's just a flaw.  But, despite that, the book had an enduring emotional impact on me. I preferred that aspect to Station Eleven, a mildly engaging story which shallow-dives it's most interesting ideas using pedestrian, if sometimes florid, prose.  /hm.
//I am liking Kerry's comments.  Kerry has the hungrylikethewolf blog, right?

-Marinus: While I haven't read Untamed State, I know what it is to forgive a book even extremely deep flaws because its emotional core rings true.   And, much as I did like parts of Station Eleven, I think Mandel used good writing to disguise ultimately cliched ideas, to the detriment of that emotional core.


-drewlynn: I do think Judge Kim made the right choice, though, choosing the important and timely book over the beautiful one. Having said that, I can't imagine ever rereading AUS again but look forward to returning to the world of S11.

-Yes, yes, yes! Judge Kim nailed this ruling. As she says about Mireille in An Untamed State, "But I remember the woman at the heart of An Untamed State, and I won't forget her soon." Ms. Gay's novel captures the fullness of character better than any work that I've read in a longtime.


Judgemnt: You don’t skip over what Mireille endures. You know what happens and what parts of her hurt. There are many pitfalls to writing about people who have been brutalized. Sometimes details get glossed over, because the word “rape” alone is intended to tell you everything. At the other end of the spectrum, too many details make crumpled paper dolls out of people, and then the brutality becomes the point, not the people. But in An Untamed State, Mireille is always the point. Her charmed life up to her kidnapping is shown in full, so you know who she was before and what she has to lose. You see everything that happens to her during her captivity: what she goes through, and how she absolutely must change in order to survive it.

-I don't know if I can say that I enjoyed An Untamed State, but she did an incredible job of not making the violence and rape and horrors gratuitous. All of that was necessary to understand Mareille as a character.


-One of my big criticisms was actually something that Judge Kim and our commentators and lots of people are trumpeting: that Gay doesn't flinch. She keeps the violence so described that I actually felt numb. Which, as several people have told me, might be the point  but I am a believer in the thing of your imagination ALWAYS being more harrowing than whatever someone writes down that you read. /hmm. no probably for me that is less true. than:
-I think the mind can be powerful but there was something different about reading it here. Knowing it. Not making an assumption she was suffering because of a vague notion I have of "rape" but of reading exactly what her suffering was caused by. It made it unavoidable. It also allowed me to feel something for her husband who didn't know. Who was filling in with some vague notion of rape. because the rape I would imagine would not be the horror she experienced.

-itsonlyZach: I felt bad about how much I was annoyed by Mireille in her flashbacks to life before her kidnapping. All of her soap opera dialogue.  I guess in a novel like this with so much repetitive violence (which I get, and was dutifully horrified by), I expected there to be more salient analysis of race and class dynamics, whether explicit or not. Whether it's fair or not, my high expectations for this author weren't met. I wanted to be haunted. I wasn't. I was happy to not read about the violence anymore, but mostly happy to be away from all these characters.

-Oh, thank God. I attended a local book club, about 35 people, who'd read it, and I was one of the only people there who didn't rave about it. Is it because of the subject matter that people are willing to overlook the sometimes poor quality of the writing?

-Tim: I don't get the appeal of An Untamed State.  After all that unrelenting rape and violence it started to feel more like pornography than literature. About a third of the way through the book I started wondering if there was going to be anything but sexual violence and just enough hints of the past to let us feel how thoroughly degraded our heroine has become, so I skipped to the last few pages to see if there would be any pay-off - and it was more sexual violence.    I get why some of the commentariat say this book stayed with them after reading it. I felt the same way, but not in a good way. I'd unread the pages I got through if I could.   To judge from the responses here, there is something in the two thirds of the book I gave up on besides the rape and the pale fairy-tale "before" to set up the contrast and make us appreciate just how awful her experience is (what, because it wouldn't be as awful if she had been poor and picked up off the streets? /right good/ ). But if so, too little, too late for me.    I'm not sure the relentless recounting of the details really added much to the story. Some of the commentariat seem to argue that it was really necessary to "get" it. But I'm not convinced.  By the time I quit (and I'll accept the criticism that the parts that I didn't read were the good ones) the contrast between the uninspired "before" scenes, and the explicitly detailed captivity scenes convinced me that this was really going to be a tale of sexual abuse, and not recovery, and not Haiti, and not poverty and wealth, and not anything that might sufficiently redeem it  






-Caroline Pruett: It really jumped out at me that nobody called out the violence or sexual content in 'All the Birds' //fvr!//  while 'An Untamed State,' 'Brief History,' and even 'The Paying Guests' have been cited for going 'too far' in some way. I'm not questioning those criticisms (except maybe TPG), I just wonder how Wyld's book managed to get coded as tasteful, lyrical etc - which I think might even be a disservice to Wyld's willingness to engage with some rough material.

-Drew: I actually found the depictions of violence more harrowing in A Brief History and even in All the Birds. The fact that it was often a little more "tasteful" or "lyrical" or "writerly" or whatever terms might appropriately apply (depending on the breadth of scenes in question) was what engaged my brain more.   ..You can go as far as you want down the unflinching rabbit hole, so long as you allow me to come alongside and put my own brain into play. I never really felt like I had a chance to do that during An Untamed State - or at least, by the end (the recovery section) when I finally started to engage a little more, I was just reading to be done and couldn't be won back.

-Felicity:  Absolutely concur. All the Birds, Singing was extremely violent and horrible, but rather than telling you how traumatized Jake was by what had been done to her, it told you what she did next and let you see and feel the trauma in how she lived her life.     AUS kind of beats you over the head with what happens and how to feel about it. On the very first page: "They wanted to break me. It was not personal. I was not broken. This is what I tell myself."  /eh. maybe I d n want to read. maybe will skim. at libr or sth./ To me, those words are a lot less effective at conveying trauma than a description of Jake trying to sleep in AtBS and failing because she hears noises in her house. Jake, too, had men try to break her and maybe or maybe not was broken. But Wyld lets yo  see and feel that for yourself instead of telling you that it's true.      -I would be totally fine with a "stark, straightforward" telling of trauma if I thought it was well-written. Cliche about something as sensitive and terrible as this makes me feel that the story is not actually given its proper due.   -I just personally don't find the way the question is posed to be compelling. To me, "They wanted to break me... I was not broken" is cliche language about rape. Of course, all cliche holds a kernel of truth. But it can also be very distancing and demeaning because it's so impersonal and vague. I personally found it very distancing, so much so that Mireille didn't feel real enough to me to care whether she was broken or not. Whereas with Jake I absolutely, passionately cared.




-Marinus: I just realized that I'm a little sorry Station Eleven won't get a face-off with Annihilation  /my other fvr!/.
-I pity the judge trying to compare Annihilation and An Untamed State.
-I've been thinking the same; though I'm biased in that I just finished Authority yesterday so my head is still in the world of Area X. /cool/  And frankly I'd rather keep it there with all the weirdness /cool/ than return the brutal horror and sadness of Untamed State.




-Bill Hughes: Before I read the comments, I was planning on sitting today out, because I thought that not preferring Untamed State would be "monstrous." I wonder the same about tomorrow's match up. If I don't choose "Redeployment," am I not supporting a war hero, not supporting the troops? I did enjoy Redeployment quite a bit, but I preferred Silence Once Begun. Probably that is due to my liking a single narrative more than a series of short stories. But that's a discussion for tomorrow. <<





_____________
and re other bks poss of int ~
fr cmmtry by Elliott & Laura (whose bks also I might be int in, but cmmtry here not especially make me.  maybe Elliott more than Laura.

Elliott: I like unsettling fiction and I like bleakness. Mary Gaitskill’s Veronica //blue on white galley, on my shelf; d n ~take; will try again sometime maybe/ is one of my favorite contemporary novels and it is a brilliantly painful read. And Atticus Lish’s Preparation for the Next Life, which was published last year, is brutal, but I loved it. It’s a book that has really stuck with me. //maybe the book reviews of wh hv been most outstanding *to me*, in my bk rvw reading since last fall.  I mean I read a couple rvws in NYT but maybe first elsewh, re Lish at a party in NY w his father Gordon Lish, where Atticus came w his backpack, and then I looked at his online CV, and re Tyrant bks, and it seemed ~ grassroots. (not meaning just indie, but?)  but then it is getting mainstr attn, in fact a lot, and now on ~5 bk short list for Pen Faulkner.   
love sprawling, multi-dimensional books—Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex, David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, and Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 spring to mind //nah (not been m int in/ —and [also] I love taut, spare novels that tunnel deep into a particular consciousness—like, say, Elena Ferrante’s The Days of Abandonment or Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day. My favorite novels are voice-driven.  //am int Ferrante now th hv clarified for myself th is not the author of that other ~ first? notable much praised fr Europa Press bk elegance hedgehog.
Station Eleven is a completely different kind of book: it’s driven not by voice, but by premise. It’s what I call “fiction-y fiction.” But it’s executed so well. It’s vivid and graceful, it’s well paced.
Laura:  I like that this book was so wildly popular /wait. it's not like 'fiction-y fiction' hasn't been consistently wildly popular is it?  ATLWCS, this year.  Wolf Hall. that was 2010.  Franzen.  last year chmpnshp btw Jms McBride Good Lord Bird and Kate Atkinson Life after Life.  neither of those are much ~ autofiction right? /
amidst the rise of “autofiction” à la  Ben Lerner /hv seen ~ not of int?/ and Rachel Cusk /look into/ and Karl Ove Knausgård /fvr. I really did love Time for Evth/, to name a few.                               *
Elliott:  Those writers are so up my alley: books that are about the struggle to narrate our own lives. I would have loved to see Ben Lerner’s 10:04 in this tournament.






*///just had a sense (oh prompted by 'Knausgaard' to go to the feeling of ~ Scandinavian, spare, sad?) of a book -- re someone ~ an oldish man ~ off alone in a house not near neighbors.  as if sth in this tourn.  and realized = All The Birds, Singing.  /having read sample.  youngish woman.  but wonder, will it feel to me somewh like Per Petterson  Out Stealing Horses   ?