On Whale Island
Notes from a Place I Never Meant to Leave
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- 12,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
A memoir of a year spent on a deserted island off Nova Scotia, from the New York Times–bestselling author of My Old Man and the Sea.
After Daniel Hays and his father built a twenty-five-foot boat and sailed it around Cape Horn, he thought he’d finally put his wanderlust to rest. He bought a house, took a job, and got married. But as it turned out, in the “real world,” he just felt lost.
Yearning to escape civilization and find a new adventure, he bought an island off the coast of Nova Scotia; built a tiny house; packed up his wife and stepson, two dogs, and three boatloads of supplies; and moved there.
This is the true story of fulfilling a fantasy: to live by your own rules and your own wits. Taking Thoreau’s ideal of self-sufficiency to heart, Daniel generates electricity from solar power and a terrifying windmill, funnels rainwater for their showers, creates a toilet seat out of a whale vertebra, and strings their bed up on pulleys so that by day it can be lifted out of the way. For him, every morning is a wonder and every storm a blood-coursing thrill.
But while Daniel loves this simple life in the wilderness, his wife longs for the world they left behind, and his spirited stepson is feeling isolated. Soon, their Swiss Family Robinson existence becomes a vision only Daniel can see.
Funny, tender, and fascinating, filled with the details of an unconventional life, this is the story of how the Hays family lived on Whale Island, and how, finally, they had to leave.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In his previous book, My Old Man and the Sea, Hays and his father built a sailing boat and navigated around Cape Horn. Theirs was a heartfelt tale of adventure, family and the good old days. Hoping to pull those same heartstrings here, Hays places himself in a Walden-like wilderness. Bored with convention and surviving on diminishing royalty checks, Hays decides to move his family wife, stepson, dogs and all to the middle of nowhere for a year. Handily, he already owns a 50-acre wilderness called Whale Island, just off the coast of Nova Scotia and the perfect venue for such an enterprise. The text chronicles those 365 days (wife Wendy refused any more) and is as self-conscious as the move itself, comprising Hays's condescending accounts of his efforts to live deliberately, Thoreau-style, despite the objections of the Tupperware and latt -loving Wendy. Her own writings, and those of his son, are peppered throughout. Not that Hays thinks he is perfect but he casts himself so enthusiastically as the wronged Woody Allen or John Kennedy Toole hero, he seems a self-perpetuating stereotype.
