Buon lunedì, prodi seguaci!☃️

Ho passato un bel fine settimana nella Terra di Mezzo, dato che in Toscana siamo di nuovo in zona arancione e fa un freddo che pela gli orsi: nessuna necessità o voglia di mettere il naso fuori di casa. Proprio un bel momento per iniziare a leggere Station Eleven di Emily St. John Mandel (che vi ricordo pubblicato in italiano da Bompiani) e di come la civiltà per come la conosciamo potrebbe finire per un’influenza in questa versione postapocalittica.

AN INCOMPLETE LIST:  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 photographs of concert stages. 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 win-  dows, points of glimmering light; no more looking down from thirty thousand  feet and imagining the lives lit up by those lights at that moment. No more air-  planes, no more requests to put your tray table in its upright and locked position—but no, this wasn’t true, there were still airplanes here and there. They  stood dormant on runways and in hangars. They collected snow on their  wings. In the cold months, they were ideal for food storage. In summer the  ones near orchards were filled with trays of fruit that dehydrated in the heat. Teenagers snuck into them to have sex. Rust blossomed and streaked. 

No more countries, all borders unmanned.  No more fire departments, no more police.

No more road maintenance or garbage pickup. No more spacecraft rising up from Cape Canaveral, from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, from Vandenburg, Plesetsk, Tanegashima, burning paths through the atmosphere into space. 

No more Internet. No more social media, no more scrolling through litanies  of dreams and nervous hopes and photographs of lunches, cries for help and  expressions of contentment and relationship-status updates with heart icons  whole or broken, plans to meet up later, pleas, complaints, desires, pictures of babies dressed as bears or peppers for Halloween. No more reading and commenting on the lives of others, and in so doing, feeling slightly less alone in the room. No more avatars.

An audacious, darkly glittering novel set in the eerie days of civilization’s collapse, Station Eleven tells 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.
One snowy night Arthur Leander, a famous actor, has a heart attack onstage during a production of King Lear. Jeevan Chaudhary, a paparazzo-turned-EMT, is in the audience and leaps to his aid. A child actress named Kirsten Raymonde watches in horror as Jeevan performs CPR, pumping Arthur’s chest as the curtain drops, but Arthur is dead. That same night, as Jeevan walks home from the theater, a terrible flu begins to spread. Hospitals are flooded and Jeevan and his brother barricade themselves inside an apartment, watching out the window as cars clog the highways, gunshots ring out, and life disintegrates around them.
Fifteen years later, Kirsten is an actress with the Traveling Symphony. Together, this small troupe moves between the settlements of an altered world, performing Shakespeare and music for scattered communities of survivors. Written on their caravan, and tattooed on Kirsten’s arm is a line from Star Trek: “Because survival is insufficient.” But when they arrive in St. Deborah by the Water, they encounter a violent prophet who digs graves for anyone who dares to leave.
Spanning decades, moving back and forth in time, and vividly depicting life before and after the pandemic, this suspenseful, elegiac novel is rife with beauty. As Arthur falls in and out of love, as Jeevan watches the newscasters say their final good-byes, and as Kirsten finds herself caught in the crosshairs of the prophet, we see the strange twists of fate that connect them all. A novel of art, memory, and ambition, Station Eleven tells a story about the relationships that sustain us, the ephemeral nature of fame, and the beauty of the world as we know it.