Bleaker House: Chasing My Novel to the End of the World
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When she was twenty-seven, Nell Stevens—a lifelong aspiring novelist—won an all-expenses-paid fellowship to go anywhere in the world to write. Would she choose a glittering metropolis, a romantic village, an exotic paradise? Not exactly. Nell picked Bleaker Island, a snowy, windswept pile of rock in the Falklands. Other than sheep, penguins, paranoia, and the weather, there aren’t many distractions, but as Nell soon discovers, total isolation and 1,085 calories a day are far from ideal conditions for literary production. With deft humor, this memoir traces her island days and slowly reveals the life and people she has left behind in pursuit of her writing. It seems that there is nowhere she can run—an island or the pages of her notebook—to escape the big questions of love, art, and, ambition.
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It's a fun premise for a story: Nell Stevens is a wonderful writer but nothing happens in her stories, so she decides to travel to what is almost literally the ends of the earth to write. Ironically, while she is there, alone on one of the Falkland Islands, nothing happens to her, and her novel goes nowhere, and she decides to write an account of her time in the Falkland Islands, where nothing happened. What is the result? This book, beautifully written (because she is a wonderful writer) but it's a story she has to pad by including the novel she tried to write, a story she wrote earlier in her life, and little stories about other events in her life. It is fine writing but my advice to you, Nell? People really want things to happen in the stories they read. Next time, perhaps, you should travel to a busier spot?
