Review: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Station Eleven has a fun premise but a messy execution. A deadly pandemic hits Toronto and wipes out 99% of humanity. The narrative unfolds across multiple timelines in the decades before and after a fictional SARS-like virus emerges, all revolving around the lives of film star Arthur Leander and his connections. Twenty years after the pandemic, civilization has collapsed, and mankind lives on in small clusters of families scattered about the land. There is no electricity and people live by hunting in the forests and scavenging relics of the past.

The novel contrasts characters who drift through their lives with those who purposefully construct meaning. Arthur’s best friend, Clark, who had originally wished to become an actor, works as a coach for business executives. For his work, he interviews a woman about one such executive, and she gives a diagnosis of the ills of the modern era:

“[Adulthood]’s full of ghosts. … I’m talking about these people who’ve ended up in one life instead of another and they are just so disappointed. Do you know what I mean? They’ve done what’s expected of them. They want to do something different but it’s impossible now, there’s a mortgage, kids, whatever, they’re trapped. Dan’s like that. … But I don’t think he even realizes it. You probably encounter people like him all the time. High-functioning sleepwalkers, essentially.”

This quote captures the main themes explored as we get to know our broad cast of characters. Arthur is one of these “sleepwalkers”: he escapes his birthplace of the tiny island off the coast of British Columbia for the big, anonymous city of Toronto, but leaves university to become an actor. His career progresses in a blur of parties and fortune. He falls into a relationship with Miranda: she needed a refuge from her abusive relationship, he liked that she was from his place of birth and unconnected to Hollywood. He just as quickly falls into an affair with the woman who becomes his second wife, and then soon after, begins a relationship with his third wife. Other characters at varying times also avoid confronting the real world in front of them, or the unhappiness within themselves. Frank, the brother of the paparazzo who tried to save Arthur’s life, spends the first days of the pandemic writing public relations fluff for a wealthy philanthropist, allowing him to put off thinking about the world changing and what his place in it will be. 

Miranda, on the other hand, is far more conscious of her goals and decision-making. Following her divorce, she pursues a career in shipping because the office environment is a calm and serene contrast to her cramped and chaotic student apartment she had shared with her abusive boyfriend. She creates an extensive graphical sci-fi novel for nobody — or rather, for her own personal satisfaction, not money or fame. Her comics share their title with this novel, and survive long past her own death. The paparazzo, Jeevan, treats his job with mercenary-like detachment, but plans to become a paramedic: he wanted to be the type of guy people turn to in a crisis. Although his plans derail in the wake of the outbreak, he finds purpose in settling down and starting a family, and rebuilding society.

The climax fits into this theme disjointedly: twenty years post-apocalypse, a prophet has arisen and is violently bringing “salvation” to the world. Over the course of the novel, the Prophet captures and kills several characters we become familiar with, before ultimately being assassinated by a member of his own movement who we barely know. Although the Prophet is the main antagonist in the post-pandemic scenes, his character is underdeveloped. His belief that everything happens for a reason leads him to conclude that the pandemic was divine intervention. This teleological definition of purpose is different from the purposiveness explored through the other characters. Religion and radical movements are of course sources of meaning and purpose in life, but this angle was explored simplistically. I wondered if the author had plotted out one storyline, and then not course-corrected this plotline when her character exploration took her into different thematic territory. 

Indeed, I wondered why the author centered the story around a pandemic at all. The major themes were most compellingly developed in the prepandemic timelines, while the apocalypse felt like an unnecessary narrative frame. The sleepwalker theme as well as the author’s other comments about interpersonal connection (e.g., Arthur’s relationship with his friend, V—“I used her as a repository for my thoughts. I think I stopped thinking of her as a human being reading a letter”) and of being known or observed (small island life, urban anonymity, paparazzi spying) were interesting, and explored well. The post-apocalyptic world, on the other hand, is surprisingly boring. The author has clearly thought deeply about her world — there is extensive detailing of logistics — but never did I feel curious to learn more.

Perhaps it is because it is a rather sterile world. The characters necessarily focus on survival and logistics rather than lofty questions about the meaning of life. But even in stressful and existential situations, humans connect and bond with each other. This connection is mostly absent from the author’s post-pandemic plotlines. People’s emotions are instead explored through their connections with objects — old comics and magazines, items scavenged from the beforetimes, a snowglobe carried about — lending these passages a nostalgic and detached tone, and one that often shifts into a critique of consumerism.

I think the author’s underestimation of the emotional needs of humans even in desperate situations also limits her handling of the Prophet. His rise is portrayed as incomprehensible and he and his followers are one-dimensionally zealous. Naturally, writing in the early 2010s, the author would have had no knowledge of the reactionary and fascistic movements that gained steam after the 2020 pandemic outbreak. But much older works have better captured similar vitriolic and religious reactions to plagues, as well as the more positive emotional responses that arise in their wake.

The novel tells the stories of creatives: actors, writers, photographers, musicians. The last few days of civilization are told by television news and newspaper columns. There is something missing entirely: politics. No government body guides behavior or organizes responses. The characters do not remark on this absence — except for noting the failure of the national guard to save them. Nor do we see nascent political bodies form in the ashes of civilization. Excluding the authoritarian orders of the Prophet (and perhaps the Conductor’s benignly dictatorial control over the travelling orchestra), everything appears to be managed through easy, unanimous, anarchistic consensus. Perhaps the author believes that with self-actualization taking a back seat to basic survival, political disagreement vanishes. The right-wing attacks on science and the state in response to COVID stay-at-home orders shred that belief. Indeed, reading the novel with all the hindsight of the 2020s, it is surprising that the Prophet does not appear to be capitalizing off the fears and anxieties of his followers. Politics is how humans collectively determine purposeful activity (or, as it were, “sleepwalk” into climate change or through pandemics). Collective negotiation of purpose is far more challenging than individual determination of purpose, and so its absence is notable. 

The novel is now an HBO TV show. The author often composes her scenes as if they were television shots. While this style is not particularly literary, I imagine it made for a more straight-forward adaptation. The unevenness and holes in the themes that plague the novel may also translate better to a series of cohesive television episodes.

Review: From The Ashes by Jesse Thistle

This memoir is narrative more than it is introspective. Having read it, I now know the darkest events that marked Jesse Thistle’s life, but I still don’t really know who Jesse Thistle is. What was it that went through his head or tore apart his heart when he went from kicking one addiction to immediately starting another? What was it that kept him going through each tragedy, rather than succumbing to the horrors of homelessness and addiction like so many others? What was it that finally gave him the strength to go clean, that last time?

I think the memoir wasn’t written to answer these questions, but to teach the reader the answer to a different question: why is it that homeless people can’t just get back on their feet? Thistle shows us — often in gory detail — how illiteracy, the pressures of starvation, medical problems, workplace exploitation, court fees and police records, ragged wardrobes, and broken social networks all work together to make that feat near impossible, even outside of drug dependency. But there is a missing piece to his answer, the human emotions of it that are shared with even comfortably-housed readers: relationships with father figures that corrode under mutual toxic masculinity, separation from social communities, addiction, reconciliation. How do you process these experiences? How do they feel? Solving the problem of homelessness is not just a matter of charity, of getting people off the streets, but of recognition of humanity. Weaving in not just the main narrative beats of his life path but also the parts of his experience that are surprisingly universal would have made for a more powerful, unforgettable book.

To ask someone to share the deepest parts of their heart is a lot. I am often a little awestruck when I find an author who can do so — recent partially-autobiographical reads Ti Amo and This Accident of Being Lost come to mind. I can understand why an advocate for the Metis people and for homeless people, who is probably asked often to share his experiences for the advancement of the cause, might try to keep a little bit of himself to himself.

Structurally, the memoir is a series of poems and short stories that rarely span more than one chapter. Thistle crafts them well: they are well-paced, filled with striking imagery, and encapsulate particular challenges or issues tidily. But it leads to an overall disjointed narrative. A teacher shows him kindness, then is never heard of again. His mother welcomes him to her home, but he rebuffs her, and the topic is not raised again. The world is similarly disjointed. There are brief allusions to the lack of treaty rights for the Metis, the declining social safety net, the lack of workplace protections for day labourers. If we want to house everyone in Canada, we need to recognize how each of these are related.

Review: This Accident of Being Lost by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

The author seems to have put a lot of herself in this book. Or, at least, there are some intensely intimate passages that feel so neurotically and emotionally particular, and so I imagine the author has to have drawn a lot of these lines from the contours of her soul. Maybe she embellished a bit here, amplified a bit there, and twisted in strands from people she's known over these threads. Is it strange to move through the world when so many people know these pieces of your heart? Or, rather, imagine that they know these pieces of your heart?

The unifying themes of these short stories are love in the digital age and being indigenous while settler capitalism destroys the planet. In the first theme, Leanne explores modern experiences like the strange intimacy of online friendships, the overthinking that comes with 15-minute gaps between messages, the way interactions can be quantified and analyzed, the way the real world and the digital world bleed into each other. In the latter theme, Simpson shows rich examples of indigenous connection to the earth, not the sappy stereotyped "Mother Earth is so powerful. The water is so sacred" kind of platitudes settlers want to uplift (to quote a sarcastic line from the final short story), but what it means to feel connection to a place and to your ancestors, the struggles of weaving in modern living and tradition, and sharing these experiences with people.

Not every story or song was to my tastes, but the highlights were meaningful to me.

Review: Western Marxism by Domenico Losurdo

Losurdo’s most important intervention in this work is to reframe the idea of Western Marxism as “a product of defeat” — to borrow a phrase from Perry Anderson’s Considerations on Western Marxism, to which Losurdo is directly responding. Writing in the 1970s, at the peak of the socialist national liberation movements, Anderson explains:

The failure of the socialist revolution to spread outside Russia, cause and consequence of its corruption inside Russia, is the common background to the entire theoretical tradition of this period. Its major works were, without exception, produced in situations of political isolation and despair.

As Losurdo argues, this period was not a failure of the spread of socialist revolution, but a striking success. It was simply not recognized as such by Western Marxists due to their lack of appreciation of the demands of social construction (necessary for satisfaction of economic needs and evasion of neocolonialism) and their expectation that the state should “wither away” more rapidly (impossible when it is needed for construction of a new society). Having taken on idealistic and dogmatic characteristics, Western Marxism neglected the historical and geographical context of these early socialist revolutions.

The final section in the book presents Losurdo’s argument for how “Marxism in the West can be reborn” and is also valuable. Losurdo argues that Marx and Engels saw the path to communism as a long and gradual one. Interestingly, he also highlights that Marx anticipated that the bourgeois revolution would extend political rights more universally; history instead showed that these gains came through the pressures exerted by worker-led and anti-colonial revolutions. These revolutions faced conditions of economic underdevelopment and imperial pressure, and achieved neither universal political emancipation nor economic emancipation. Western Marxism criticized these nations for not quickly delivering on the promises of later stages of communism envisioned by Marx:

The concrete history of the new post-revolutionary society, which seeks to develop itself among the tentative contradictions, difficulties, and errors of every kind, is defined en bloc as a degeneration and betrayal of the real movement in the name of the remote and utopian futures, an attitude foreign to Marx and Engels and which deprives Marxism of any real emancipatory project.

To take such an attitude means arbitrarily amputating the plural temporalities that characterize the revolutionary project of Marx and Engels. It means a temporal amputation that is simultaneously spatial. It concentrates exclusively on the remote future, read in a utopian vein, and leads to the exclusion of the vast majority of the world and humanity that has begun to take the first steps toward modernity and has sometimes even stopped at its threshold. And so the essential condition for the rebirth of Marxism in the West is the transcendence of this temporal and spatial amputation of the revolutionary project it has carried out.

Western Marxism criticized without being part of “real struggles” — a practice Marx mocked. Its leading figures instead yearned for an immediate rupture with the state of things, while refusing “to take up the problems arising from taking power” (Part V, 5 — also an essential section). Losurdo’s ultimate conclusion is that “Overcoming doctrinaire attitudes, the willingness to measure oneself against one’s own time, and philosophizing rather than prophesying are the necessary preconditions for Marxism’s rebirth and development in the West.”

Published in Italian in 2017 and in English in 2024, this book is both the most recent of Losurdo’s works to be translated into English and one of his final works before his death in 2018 at the age of 76. Perhaps aware that he had not much life ahead of him, this book reads a little rushed, although I agree with his overall thesis, the need for this critique of Western Marxism and his prescription for a path forward. This hurriedness is unfortunate, because his argument has been rather summarily dismissed by Western Marxism.

A more unavoidable critique would have taken the form of an intellectual biography and critical balance sheet of Western Marxism, as Losurdo provides for Nietzsche in his paradigm-shifting Nietzsche, The Aristocratic Rebel. Instead, Losurdo engages very briefly with each thinker — many of whom fit awkwardly into the Western Marxist canon, like Arendt. His critiques tend to follow the pattern of a quote by a Western Marxist praising Western Liberalism juxtaposed against the materialist, realist, ambitious and optimistic positions taken by revolutionary figures in the anti-colonial movement (Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Lenin, etc). Again, I don’t think Losurdo is wrong to criticize these writers for ignoring colonialism, but I find his attacks rather superficial and unsystematic, particularly compared to some of his other works. 

For new readers, I’d recommend instead Liberalism: A Counter-history or Democracy or Bonapartism? as entry points into his works. For those that want a more systematic presentation of Losurdo’s support for national liberation movements and defense of actually existing socialism, I would recommend Class Struggle instead — in particular, his insistence on technological progress and on the consideration of class struggle as the struggle for recognition are ideas touched on in this book but better developed in that work.

For readers familiar with his work, you might be surprised how little new you find in these pages. There are passages remixed from all three books recommended above, as well as from his 2004 essay on Arendt (“Towards a Critique of the Category of Totalitarianism”), his 1999 essay “Flight from History?”, and his book on Stalin. There’s nothing wrong with this — I, too, revisit ideas and examples over and over. But I think a remix should add up to more than the sum of its parts and your most vital blows must land on your targets.

Review: Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell

The author is too charmed by her main character, Agnes (Anne) Hatheway. This is not uncommon in literature, but I think there are some interesting insights into how this particular version of the trope reflects our times.

This fictionalized version of William Shakespeare’s wife, Agnes, is supernaturally intuitive, able to discern a person’s thoughts just by holding their hand. She is wise in the ways of plants and flouts social norms; these traits portray her as above the crude pragmatism and small-mindedness of the rest of the villagers. She passes gracefully from manic pixie dream girl to goddess mother, birthing her first daughter in the serenity of the forest.

The author has no problem subjecting her heroine to strife. Agnes’s beloved nymph-like mother dies in childbirth early in Agnes’s childhood. Her step-mother is cruel and her in-laws treat her little better. Her youngest daughter is born sickly, and needs special care. Her son dies.

The author is, however, unable to portray a real change in Agnes. At the end of the novel, Agnes is who she is at the start and throughout each of these challenges: plant-wise, norm-flouting, guided by intuition. She has climbed out of the depths of her mourning of her son, and discovered that her husband, too, was grappling with grief; and yet she has not confronted herself, her fears, her weaknesses, and transformed, in the way we expect of a novel’s heroine. Agnes is a fantasy: an ideal of womanhood and femininity that is all intuition, emotion, and connection with nature. 

This is a seductive fantasy, and so it is not surprising the author is disinclined to confront it — a necessary critique if Agnes is to undergo a character transformation. At first blush, this fantasy appears as a challenge to patriarchy: women are granted special powers, special knowledge, that men could never have. Agnes’s nurturing care and herbs are favourably contrasted to the cool, distant, and ineffective male plague doctor, for example. But underneath, there is nothing liberatory about it. Agnes achieves material wealth through the literary successes of the husband she chose based on her magical visions. This provides her a degree of emancipation, but it is granted by a man, and denied to other women. Reverence of the magic of reproduction does not challenge a system that (often violently) controls how women reproduce.

The novel foils Agnes’s intuition against masculine rationality. The author is, of course, limited by historical fact: women were overwhelmingly denied access to literacy and education. There are examples of female characters learning their letters; Agnes’s eldest daughter learns accounting and writing and takes over the running of the household. But it is not shown as liberatory, or really even useful beyond the domestic sphere. Indeed, this example serves only to show how cycles of teenage rebellion repeat, as the daughter despairs of ever being able to escape her home, just as Agnes once did. Agnes’s intuition is ultimately as useful as anything that can be taught in books. Her plant knowledge appears similarly innate — there are allusions to mentors who taught her falconing and bee-keeping and other such skills, but they happen off-page; to struggle with systematizing knowledge, or to portray trial and failure of such witchy skills might dampen the fantasy.

We could contrast this with Virginia Woolf’s thought experiment about the importance of education and training in A Room of One’s Own. Conveniently, she picks a near-identical character: William Shakespeare’s sister. Woolf emphasizes the lack of education that makes up women’s oppression:

She had no chance of learning grammar and logic, let alone of reading Horace and Virgil. She picked up a book now and then, one of her brother's perhaps, and read a few pages. But then her parents came in and told her to mend the stockings or mind the stew and not moon about with books and papers.

Indeed in Woolf’s view, motherhood is a source of oppression, not power.

So is Hamnet rooted in the past? A pre-Woolf vision of feminine empowerment? Not at all. Indeed the book ought to be read in the context of modern debates over motherhood: natural versus medicated births, the trauma arising from one’s “birth plan” not being followed, the way caring for a special needs kid shapes your decision-making. Agnes, it goes without saying, is on the side of natural births and at-home births (or, at-forest births, as it were). She fits in with the spirituality of the “wellness industry”. 

In place of character growth, the author focuses on lushly painting intense emotions. She wields language unusually to do so; the entire novel is told in the present tense. She leans heavily on lists of three — a pattern so distracting that the reader should try her best to put it out of mind and simply allow the redundant adjectives to wash over her. Her unique style is very effective for those dreamlike moments of life, like the depths of grief, where even the smallest experiences feel sharp yet disconnected from ordinary life. It is also effective when the narrative shifts from following Agnes to following inanimate things: some of the most memorable passages trace the journey of a plague-carrying flea and a news-laden letter. Her choice of style is less effective when narrating the more routine aspects of life, like business negotiations. In these scenes, the prose heightens the importance of everything yet weighs it down in its excess of lush detail. It is sensuous prose, relishing in being and feeling.

And so we have a novel that emphasizes intuition and feeling. We have a superhuman, who inherits her elevated sensitivity from her mother, and passes it on to her children. We have a book that revels in the magic and beauty of motherhood. It is a heady combination. It is also a familiar combination. The name that we gave to that 20th century movement that celebrated irrationality over reason, Übermenschen, naturalism and a fantastical version of maternity is, of course, fascism.

Review: The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

Reading other reviews of The Metamorphosis, I am struck by how impressions of this book seems to reveal more about the reader than the author's intent. How do you approach subtext, metaphor, and unreliable narration? How do you interpret interpersonal tensions, familial relationships, and introspection?

In my reading, this is a book about a crisis of self, and of how this impacts a family. Gregor is a young man who is the sole income earner for his aging parents and younger sister, working a dreary and arduous job that brings him little social recognition. Famously, he wakes up one morning having been transformed into a bug.

Or rather, in my reading, one may as well describe what has happened as a metamorphosis into an insect. In an existential crisis, how else can he describe the way questioning his place in the world and his possible futures makes him completely change his sense of self?

This crisis could be brought on by anything: coming out of the closet, suicidal ideation, loss of faith. From a Doylist perspective, this monstrous metamorphosis is a convenient narrative device. To discuss any one of these challenges is to need to speak of their particulars. The absurd and unexplained transformation into a bug allows you to discuss their similarities.

Gregor's family responds at first in revulsion. His sister starts to treat him with sympathy, but never real closeness; she does not speak to him, does not recognize his humanity. For a while, his parents ignore him, hoping he will return to his old self. His family members deal with their own self identity crises, as they deal with their shame of him. Having relied on his income, they find themselves in financial difficulties, and resort to unglamorous work, selling their valuables, and taking in borders. Throughout, Gregor’s affection for his family is shown through his longing for the days they would gather around the dining table and his worries about their financial difficulties and health. But he is unable to be in company with them or to help them through their difficulties, because he is a bug.

In a climactic moment, Gregor’s mother’s attempt to bridge the chasm between her and Gregor hits a stumbling block, and is misinterpreted by Gregor’s father, who begins bombarding him with household items before being stopped by his mother.

No-one dared to remove the apple lodged in Gregor’s flesh, so it remained there as a visible reminder of his injury. He had suffered it there for more than a month, and his condition seemed serious enough to remind even his father that Gregor, despite his current sad and revolting form, was a family member who could not be treated as an enemy. On the contrary, as a family there was a duty to swallow any revulsion for him and to be patient, just to be patient.

The result is both a recognition of Gregor as family (albeit still not human recognition or emotional closeness), but also a fatal wound. Gregor ceases to eat, and slowly wastes away. A financial setback is the sister’s last straw, and she breaks down, asking her father to “try to get rid of it” — “it” being Gregor. Already near death, Gregor drags himself away to die. 

He thought back of his family with emotion and love. If it was possible, he felt that he must go away even more strongly than his sister.

It is a bleak story. For all his love for his family, his transformation prevents him from expressing it and prevents them from seeing him for who he is. In the end, he becomes only a burden to them, his passing nothing but relief. There is little suggestion that things could have gone another way, that such a metamorphosis could be handled better in the future.

Review: Ducks by Kate Beaton

Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands is Kate Beaton’s 2023 autobiographical comic book relaying the her experience graduating university in 2005 and working in the oil sands for two years. Anna Wiener blurbed the book, and I thought it was an appropriate choice: both Wiener and Beaton wrote memoirs detailing their experience as women in the male-dominated gold rushes of their particular eras and locations — Wiener in Silicon Valley in the 2010s, and Beaton in Alberta in the 2000s.

Both memoirs resonated with me personally. I graduated university not too long after Beaton. I considered the oil sands — many of my classmates were pulled into its gravitational orbit — but I couldn’t bring myself to so directly be part of the environmental devastation they wreck (a realization Beaton describes coming to in the novel). Unlike Beaton, I was fortunate to not have student debt, and so I had more of a choice. Instead, I left home for a different black hole: 2010s Silicon Valley.

A troubling question woven throughout the book is how working at the oil sands changes people. Beaton describes her experiences with sexual harassment and rape. Many of the men around her dehumanize her, treat each other with callousness and cruelty, and turn to drugs, alcohol, and prostitution. Would the men she knows and loves back home turn into these hateful men too, if they were here? I remember coming to a similar realization in my early 20s. On the social media platforms built by 2010s Silicon Valley, I discovered the manosphere and its denizens' dehumanizing and transactional perspective of women and relationships. A similar troubling question writhed through my mind: which of the men around me were secretly retreating to the anonymity of the internet to post such hateful things? 

Both the Alberta oil sands and the Silicon Valley tech scene were places people went to make money. For both places, these workers — mostly men — left their homes to be somewhere where they had no community, to work long hours. That uprooting is hard. Its concentration in an area produces a culture that supports this form of sacrifice — often a toxic one. Beaton skillfully portrays this with empathy, without condoning or shrugging off the horrors. We see the difficulty of being separated from your wife and kids, and the small actions of recognition — like sharing cookies during the Christmas Eve night shift — that can make all the difference in such wrenching times.

Beaton also beautifully builds the tension arising between the desire to stay home and the desire to leave. It is familiarly Canadian: I have family in Cape Breton, and relatives who also left the Maritimes for Atlantic Canada. Her portrayal of the growing, gnawing sense of bleakness and isolation leading up to her sexual assault and the numb confusion afterwards were so moving that I put the book down for a while.

Beaton explores community and identity well. Her connection to Cape Breton is strong, and she finds other Cape Bretoners to form a community-away-from-home, who share some of her experiences. An interesting reflection comes towards the end where she is interviewed by a Globe and Mail reporter about her experience in the oil sands, and feels that the reporter is looking for salacious quotes about the awful men who work the oil sands. She is indignant: these people were her people too, in a way; the Toronto office worker hasn’t grappled with the fact that the men in her community would also be transformed by the oil sands.

The book touches on many political topics: environmental destruction, theft of land from indigenous people, illiteracy, sexism, the back-breaking and carcinogenic nature of manual labour, social inequality, and how the profit motive exacerbates all these problems. They don’t quite all tie together right, their linkages remain murky. In part, the genre of memoir acts as a limit: the author is constrained by their own slow-growing awareness of these issues. Still, it is a touching story with some memorable illustrations, and a time capsule of a very Canadian experience.