“We all know what we do here,” says Alkaitis, as he sits them down to a final meeting about the “arrangement” in the 17th floor offices in the Gradia Building (in Station Eleven an Air Gradia jet held quarantined passengers who never disembarked), but some refuse to admit that they did know. From the award-winning author of Station Eleven, an exhilaratin. Mandel is brilliant at describing America’s “shadow country” of displaced persons that some of Alkaitis’s victims enter after they lose all their money, as well as the way it’s possible “to know and not know something”, as Oskar, one of the senior employees, puts it when giving his testimony in court. Read 14,039 reviews from the worlds largest community for readers. But while incarcerated he’s plagued by apparitions – an expanding crowd of his dead investors. When Alkaitis is in prison (his sentence, at 170 years, is even longer than Madoff’s) he slips in and out of fantasies of a “counterlife” in which he manages to escape arrest. It’s far less apocalyptic than a pandemic, of course, but the suddenness of Alkaitis’s fall, once his Ponzi collapses, is comparable to the onset of the Georgia flu in Station Eleven, when it was “possible to comprehend the scope of the outbreak” but not to understand what it meant.Ĭharacters flit in and out, connected to each other by threads that converge and separate (the large cast can be hard to keep tabs on at times, but Mandel is skilled at multiple timelines and points of view and bringing a character back into focus).
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