Head Butler -- Books: The Sex Lives of Cannibals
The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific by J. Maarten Troost

Travel books are advertisements. A writer goes somewhere, finds what's fascinating, obscures what isn't, and produces a book that makes you want to go there too.

Not Maarten Troost -- he went to one of the worst hellholes on earth.

And, fully aware it sucked, he stayed for two years.

And then he wrote the funniest travel book I have ever read -- funnier even than Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods, which has held the championship for almost a decade without serious competition.

Start with the title. Were you hoping The Sex Lives of Cannibals has some hot sex -- maybe with some hunky cannibals? It doesn't. All it has is Maarten Troost, a 26-year-old slacker, for a narrator. And it has Tarawa, an atoll in the Equatorial Pacific that is memorable mostly as the hunk of coral where 1,113 Marines and 4,300 Japanese soldiers died in three days of combat in 1943.

How did Maarten Troost get there?

It was the summer of 1996 and I had just finished graduate school in Washington, D.C., which is where I'd met my girlfriend, Sylvia. Both of us had studied international relations. I focused on Eastern Europe (think triumph of good over evil), and Sylvia concentrated on Western Europe (think agricultural subsidies), for which she has been teased mercilessly. While Sylvia passed her semesters with determined ambition, I drifted through, racking up modest grades, until finally there was not an exam left to be taken, not a paper to be turned in, and I was discharged. Job offers were not forthcoming, most likely because I didn't apply to any jobs. Nor was I particularly adept at what is called networking, which is highly encouraged among job seekers, but perhaps not entirely useful for reticent souls utterly flummoxed by what career to pursue.

Soon enough, the money runs out and he's forced to call Dad.

Dad says, "I believe at this point you owe me $180,000."

Then Sylvia is offered a job as country director for the Foundation for the Peoples of the South Pacific-Kiribati Office.

Well, why not? This tiny country -- 33 atolls, containing about 300 square miles, "though I believe it halves at high tide" -- has 80,000 people, no TV, many palm trees.

Someone who'd been there was blunt about the place: "Imagine a littered, stinking sandbar in the middle of nowhere. That's Tarawa."

As Troost would learn, it's worse. There's no coffee. If you get sick, think dengue fever, parasites or three flavors of hepatitis. Cockroaches grow as big as mice.

Well, he thinks, my backyard is the Pacific Ocean. Yes, but his house looks like "one of those single-story structures one might see in rural Oklahoma with car parts in the front yard." The walls are tinged with rust, souvenirs of the rotting ceiling fan. Which is a prized possession, because it's hot here. Sweaty hot. "Like Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen."

And the customs! Troost is swimming just offshore when he looks up to see "a giant of a man squatting in the shallows." You may imagine what follows. You cannot imagine how hard you will laugh. Ugh! Gross! I must get control of myself, you think. And then you laugh some more.

So there Troost was, stranded on a 12-square-mile island where the average citizen eats more than 400 pounds of fish a year. Beer is important here -- "it tends to be parasite-free and calorie-laden, two very useful attributes on Tarawa." There is no tradition of gardening here, so when Maarten and Sylvia talk dirty, they exchange names of foods they used to know.

How different is life on Tarawa? Very. You will learn more than you thought possible about water tanks. And why "La Macarena" lives on here. How an English fool became the Poet Laureate. What you do when your boat emerges from a channel into 25-foot waves. Why men and women bite each other's noses off. And how to lose 25 pounds without dieting.

You will also learn about the properties of the color blue, which, in the Pacific, is so rich it seems to be the essence of life. And the joys of floating for hours in water as warm as the air, with coconut trees for shade.

Eventually, of course, Sylvia gets paroled, and back she and Maarten go to Washington. But Tarawa lives on inside them. Troost's job with the World Bank does not. And so, when Sylvia is offered a position on a small island in the South Pacific, they jump at it. Happily, it is Fiji.

Maarten Troost wrote a book about Fiji. It is said to be funny. He wrote another, about China. It is also said to be amusing. But Fiji is lovely. China is powerful. Tarawa? Worst place on earth. The literal end of the world. A writer will never get better, funnier material than that.

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-- by Jesse Kornbluth, for HeadButler.com

To buy "The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific" from Amazon.com, click here.

To buy "Getting Stoned with Savages: A Trip Through the Islands of Fiji and Vanuatu" from Amazon.com, click here.

To buy "Lost on Planet China: The Strange and True Story of One Man's Attempt to Understand the World's Most Mystifying Nation, or How He Became Comfortable Eating Live Squid" from Amazon.com, click here.

Copyright 2008 by Head Butler Inc.

Jesse Kornbluth

9/26/08

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