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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
An ambiguous paradise, 28 Dec 2005
ROMAN HOLIDAY is one of my favorite films, and, after having seen it on multiple occasions, I visited Rome for the first time. You know, compared to the Hollywood version, the real Rome is a dump. Maybe it's just because I didn't have Audrey Hepburn on my arm. In THE SEX LIVES OF CANNIBALS, I gather that author J. Maarten Troost's collision with the South Seas reality of "tropical paradise" was somewhat similar. In mid-1990's, Troost follows his girlfriend Sylvia to Tarawa, capital of the Equatorial Pacific country of Kiribati, otherwise known as the Gilbert Islands. Kiribati, comprising 33 islands roughly the area of greater Baltimore, is spread over an expanse of water the size of the United States. Sylvia had gotten a job as the new country director of the FSP (Foundation for the Peoples of the South Pacific), a do-gooder organization working out of Washington, DC. Maarten and Sylvia lived on Tarawa, specifically South Tarawa, for two years. Troost has the humorous style reminiscent of another of my favorite travel essayists, Pete McCarthy. It has bite, as when Marteen describes the shenanigans of Kiribati government officials: "As far as I could tell, the government spends a lot of time drinking and brawling. No workshop on global climate change is complete until the assistant secretary of the environment has passed out in a pool of beer barf ..." And sometimes, he's right on, as when he mulls the fate of History in the United States: " ... history is largely paved over, abandoned, and relegated to textbooks so shockingly dull that they could only have been written by politically correct creationists whose sole objective was to offend no one." Hear, hear! Troost is also not above wry self-deprecation, as when he introduces himself to an island group according in the Kiribati tradition: "Maarten, son of Herman of Holland, had a medieval ring. True, it wasn't as evocative as say Vlad the Impaler, but still, Maarten, son of Herman of Holland, suggested trouble." Troost learns early on that Tarawa, the site of the bloody WWII assault by the Second Marine Division on the occupying Japanese garrison, is no tropical paradise. True, there are the glorious sunsets, crystal clear lagoons, and the achingly radiant colors of ocean, sky and palms, but there are also the feces-strewn beaches, piles of garbage, a monotonous diet (mostly fish), the suffocating heat, bad water, unreliable electrical service, no availability of mainstream print media, wretched airline connections, diseases, intestinal parasites, poor health care, a disinterested government bureaucracy, and, perhaps worst of all, no place to go. Yet, despite all this, Maarten and Sylvia discover a life, or rather a quality and pace of life, more genuine than is found back in the States. Indeed, two years after returning to Washington from Kiribati, the two return to Oceana - first to Vanuatu, then Fiji - for several years before relocating permanently to the original Land of Make Believe, California. THE SEX LIVES OF CANNIBALS contains no photos of Maarten, Sylvia, or Tarawa, or even a map of the atoll; this is its biggest deficiency. Otherwise, the author entertained me with tales of an exotic place that I shall never find the time to visit. I couldn't ask for more.
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