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The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific |  | Author: J. Maarten Troost
Publisher: Broadway
Category: Book
List Price: $14.00
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Rating:  138 reviews
Media: Paperback
Pages: 272
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.1 x 0.8
ISBN: 0767915305
Dewey Decimal Number: 306.099681
EAN: 9780767915304
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Product Description
At the age of twenty-six, Maarten Troost—who had been pushing the snooze button on the alarm clock of life by racking up useless graduate degrees and muddling through a series of temp jobs—decided to pack up his flip-flops and move to Tarawa, a remote South Pacific island in the Republic of Kiribati. He was restless and lacked direction, and the idea of dropping everything and moving to the ends of the Earth was irresistibly romantic. He should have known better.
The Sex Lives of Cannibals tells the hilarious story of what happens when Troost discovers that Tarawa is not the island paradise he dreamed of. Falling into one amusing misadventure after another, Troost struggles through relentless, stifling heat, a variety of deadly bacteria, polluted seas, toxic fish, and worst of all, no television or coffee. And that’s just the first day.
Sunburned, emaciated, and stinging with sea lice, Troost spends the next two years battling incompetent government officials, alarmingly large critters, erratic electricity, and a paucity of food options. He contends with a cast of bizarre local characters, including “Half-Dead Fred” and the self-proclaimed Poet Laureate of Tarawa (a British drunkard who’s never written a poem in his life), and eventually settles into the ebb and flow of island life, just before his return to the culture shock of civilization.
With the rollicking wit of Bill Bryson, the brilliant travel exposition of Paul Theroux, and a hipster edge that is entirely Troost’s own, The Sex Lives of Cannibals is the ultimate vicarious adventure. Readers may never long to set foot on Tarawa, but they’ll want to travel with Troost time and time again.
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 138
 Read this book! February 28, 2005
Maudeen Wachsmith (Port Townsend, WA)
73 out of 77 found this review helpful
You know how you feel when you've just finished a really good book and want to tell everyone you know about it? That is how I feel about THE SEX LIVES OF CANNIBALS. During the first few chapters I was laughing out loud so much and reading passages to my husband so often that he mentioned he wouldn't even have to read the book. However since he formerly lived in the Marshall Islands, this book hits home to him and he could hardly wait until I was done to grab it from my hands.
Maarten and Sylvia have no idea what they're getting themselves into when Sylvia agrees to a two-year contact to work on Tarawa, a remote island in the equatorial Pacific islands also known as Kiribas (The Gilbert Islands).
This was LOL funny in so many places! Maarten's turn of a phrase is so clever that he makes one laugh in the face of a nearly intolerable situation living on this remote island - part of which is so crowded it rivals Hong Kong in population density. The 20th century wasn't kind to these islanders. Their unique culture juxtaposed with the creations of the 20th century is very nearly ruining their culture. But Troost is able to find nearly everything funny (even though one wonders if he felt it was that funny at the moment) including the bowel habits of the natives. On the back of the book in Maarten's brief bio, it is revealed that he and is wife are living in California. One can only hope that he is becoming the writer for a sit-com. He makes other authors of humor/travel memoir seem dull in comparison. If I would compare him to anyone it would be Erma Bombeck-the way he is able to find hilarity in even the most mundane things.
This book deserves to be a bestseller and hopefully by word of mouth it will be.
A light entertaining account of an ex-pat's life in Kiribati October 16, 2004
saskatoonguy (Saskatoon, Saskatchewan Canada)
44 out of 51 found this review helpful
The author describes living for two years in Kiribati, an ex-British colony in the Pacific Ocean that is now independent. He thought he was moving to a tropical paradise, but instead found that even in the national capital, people would regularly defecate in the lagoon, the grocery stores couldn't keep basic staples in stock, and water and electric supplies were irregular at best. He speaks of the Kiribati people with enormous and sincere affection, but a reader can't avoid the conclusion that these islands would be better off if they were still a British colony.
Troost writes in a light, humourous tone, making this book a pleasure to read, although there are places where Troost is a little too cute for his own good. A few photos would have been a nice touch, and is it asking too much for the publisher to include a map? And by the way, the title is misleading - there is very little here about sex and nothing about cannibalism. A book this good does not need the cheap gimmick of a misleading title.
One of the best in recent years! Give this book a chance! September 1, 2005
Jessica Lux (Rosamond, CA)
24 out of 27 found this review helpful
Troost and his wife truly do go to the end of the world, to a tiny country in the equatorial Pacific, and live in an alternate reality. Troot's misadventures with the town's hygiene and sanitation, the toxic fish, a complete lack of vegetation, limited dry goods, cannibalistic dogs, a rundown airplane, high seas on a plywood boat, and the like are relayed to the reader with humor and wit. Beer is popular because it "tends to be parasite-free and calorie-laden, two very useful attributes on Tarawa." At first, Troost is an outsider, shocked by the island going-ons, but over the course of his two years there, he truly adopts the island lifestyle, so much that America is a complete culture shock for husband and wife when the part ways with Kiribati.
Troost makes some insightful comments on infrastructure--he took for granted in his previous life that water and electricity came to your house by magic. On Kiribati, he has hilariously eye-opening experiences ensuring a supply of both.
Throughout the book Troost recounts the history of Kiribati, its culture, and its relationship to the outside world. He actually does a real service to the island by recording the oral tradition and myth, and placing it in context with the slim amount of published literature on Kiribati. Over the course of his stay, he grows to be a real defender of the nation. When Kiribati sincerely accepts the offer of a British drunkard to become their Poet Laureate, the global media has quite a laugh at the nation's quaint nature. Troost is certain to set the truth straight about the lout who only lasted a few months in Kiribati.
Laugh out loud January 9, 2007
Christie (Portland, OR United States)
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
I admit I was sucked in by the title of this book. I mistakenly purchased it, believing it was a piece of fiction. I quickly realized my error when I noticed the word "travelogue" on the spine. That word filled me with terror as I envisioned a boring read about a place I had no real interest in. I couldn't have been more wrong. This is an excellent book for anyone who has the slightest hint of a sense of humor. J. Maarten Troost is a fantastically funny author, whose willingness to self-deprecate is displayed at every turn. He is human and the majority of the experiences he shares in his novel about the South Pacific ring true. Whether he is describing battling the stormy sea in a small, rickety boat or meeting the locals and partaking of their traditions, he is honest. We learn as much about the author and his pseudo-wife, as we do about the islands he visits and the people he befriends. Each chapter is brilliantly introduced with clever summaries that will have you laughing out loud. Enjoy this book. It deserves nothing less.
Heat and fish and cannibalism--and some superb writing July 28, 2004
Debra Hamel (TwitterLit.com)
8 out of 9 found this review helpful
Author J. Maarten Troost and his girlfriend Sylvia moved in their mid-twenties, in the late 90s, to Tarawa, the capital of the Republic of Kiribati, a country in the equatorial Pacific that is composed of 33 atolls--comprising in toto a mere 300 square miles--spread across a patch of ocean as big as the continental United States. Sylvia had been hired as the new director of the Kiribati office of the Foundation for the Peoples of the South Pacific, succeeding in this position an ostensibly malevolent, angular woman who, as she herself explained--dyspeptically, ill-omenedly--just couldn't take it anymore. Troost, who had recently finished graduate school in Washington D.C. and was looking to avoid serious work, and who besides had a yen for travel in lesser-known locales, was in Kiribati as a hanger-on and adventurer. He would also, of course, serve as a chronicler of the exotica to be encountered.
Among the first things Troost found worthy of thus chronicling after his arrival in Kiribati was his first blissful swim in the Pacific--all palm trees and booming surf and brilliant sun--an idyllic atmosphere that was marred by what Troost found waiting for him in the shallows when he waded back to shore: there, directly between the author and dry land, was a large pair of defecating human buttocks, whose owner soon took to wiping himself with twigs and casting aloft these feces-laden utensils on the outgoing tide...outgoing, that is, in the direction of our in-wading author. Troost later discovered that at low tide the beaches of his atoll tended to be pockmarked by reeking piles of human and animal waste.
Apart from fecal matters, which seem to loom very large indeed on Tarawa, Troost discusses the surprising abundance of fabric softener on the atoll (surprising, that is, as the I-Kiribati do not own a single dryer among them), the difficulty of riding a bike in an equatorial climate on a road covered with pigs and chickens while holding a large, wet fish, and the unexpected allure of cannibalism: "I had no desire to eat anyone's arm, but once you've digested raw sea worms and boiled moray eels you begin to think a little more creatively about what precisely constitutes food." There are, besides, bits of good-humored, informative narrative thrown in. In a section on the ethnic origins of the I-Kiribati, for example, Troost writes of the possibility that the original population of the atoll had once been displaced--read "eaten"--by savage Polynesians from Samoa:
"The Polynesians worshipped the god Rongo, and what Rongo liked was human flesh. The sails of their war canoes were creatively decorated with the likeness of a human head, called te bou-uoua. There was another crest called tim-tim-te-rara. This translates as drip-drip-the-blood, a reference to the heads driven on stakes that Rongo liked to see scattered around like knickknacks. So, picture lolling about on the beach, idly scanning the horizon, when suddenly you see hundreds of warriors approach in canoes bedecked with the image of a severed head. It's not going to be a good day."
This sort of fish-out-of-water memoir--Troost calls it a "travel, adventure, humor, memoir kind of book"--depends for its success not so much on the otherness of the location under discussion: the mores and denizens of a local diner can probably seem interesting and alien enough to warrant a book given the proper write-up. Success depends rather on the personality and writerly wit of its author. And J. Maarten Troost is a very fine writer indeed. The Sex Lives of Cannibals is a funny and charming and even eye-opening little book, just the thing to take to the beach.... But do be on the lookout for any incoming severed-head-bedecked boats.
Reviewed by Debra Hamel, author of Trying Neaira: The True Story of a Courtesan's Scandalous Life in Ancient Greece
Showing reviews 1-5 of 138
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