"The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific"
by
This book had me laughing out loud most of the way through it. That doesn't happen often for me. Beginning with the first chapter I felt an affinity with the author. He points out that upon completion of graduate school he realized that he had no real skills and no desire to get a job in the field for which he had trained. With no job offers coming in--as he had not applied for any--and with no money in his bank account he celebrates by going to Cuba with no money.
He arrives back in Washington, DC more broke and in debt than when he left, working for a temp agency, living with his girlfriend/fiancée in his mother's basement. Enter his girlfriend's job offer to help the people of Kiribati in the Pacific. They take it and he goes as her "husband" to cook and write a book that he never seems to actually write.
I grew up in the San Joaquin Valley in California and in Houston, Texas. These are places that are quite hot in the summer. In California one might wear a wool sweater in the winter when the Arctic storms sweep down from Canada. In Houston, I don't think I own a coat much less a sweater of any kind. I almost fell off the bed I was laughing so hard when Maarten insists on packing a wool sweater to take to Kiribati. It's smack dab on the equator and he's going to be living on an atoll in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. I wouldn't have bothered packing clothes at all just thinking about living in a climate that is similar to Houston's in August ALL YEAR. But he takes the sweater.
The flight from DC to Tarawa is accomplished via San Francisco, Honolulu, the Marshall Islands, and Nauru. Each stop they change planes and the plane gets smaller and smaller. The overnight stay in the Marshall Islands was quite possibly described in very non-objective terms. Cockroaches. Everywhere. They turned out the lights and one crawled up the author's back. I sympathized and knew exactly what he was talking about.
I loathe cockroaches. They don't frighten me but, rather, put me in a murderous rage. I'm not talking about whatever roaches you have in your town but the mutant, giant tree-roaches that are everywhere in the Southeast Texas region. If you've ever stepped on one in the middle of the night while getting up to go to the bathroom or had one fly in your face while you're flicking on the light at 3AM to get a glass of water you know of what I speak. The worst is waking up throwing something across a room because one was crawling across your closed, sleeping eyes. (That requires taking a shower after the killing.)
This was one of the funniest parts to me and I had to quote it in this review. He's relating one of the stories from the book "Kiribati--Aspects of History" about the first European encounters with the natives of Kiribati (Gilbert Islands.)
That's just one snippet of his writing style. Each chapter tells a different story. The description of his first dip in the lagoon. Why he's no longer afraid of sharks. The diet of fish, fish, and fish. His determination to not let ANY Mormon missionary EVER think that he would be interested in what they have to say. The over-kill of La Macarena and his desire to make it stop and how he finally got his neighbors to turn it down. All of this had me cracking up. It's not the most anthropologically correct travel book nor is it an unbiased ethnography of a culture, but it was fun to read and they only mentioned the sex lives of the natives on one page which sounded mildly horrific and painful to me. He does drop the F-bomb a bit so you were warned.
(I feel seriously behind in my weekly posts. I may be the only one who noticed that I haven't written a book review or a General Conference post in several weeks. If you have noticed and wondered what the heck was wrong with the blog, my apologies. Life got in the way.)
He arrives back in Washington, DC more broke and in debt than when he left, working for a temp agency, living with his girlfriend/fiancée in his mother's basement. Enter his girlfriend's job offer to help the people of Kiribati in the Pacific. They take it and he goes as her "husband" to cook and write a book that he never seems to actually write.
I grew up in the San Joaquin Valley in California and in Houston, Texas. These are places that are quite hot in the summer. In California one might wear a wool sweater in the winter when the Arctic storms sweep down from Canada. In Houston, I don't think I own a coat much less a sweater of any kind. I almost fell off the bed I was laughing so hard when Maarten insists on packing a wool sweater to take to Kiribati. It's smack dab on the equator and he's going to be living on an atoll in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. I wouldn't have bothered packing clothes at all just thinking about living in a climate that is similar to Houston's in August ALL YEAR. But he takes the sweater.
“No one who claims this to be a small world has ever flown across the Pacific.”
 |
| via World Atlas |
The flight from DC to Tarawa is accomplished via San Francisco, Honolulu, the Marshall Islands, and Nauru. Each stop they change planes and the plane gets smaller and smaller. The overnight stay in the Marshall Islands was quite possibly described in very non-objective terms. Cockroaches. Everywhere. They turned out the lights and one crawled up the author's back. I sympathized and knew exactly what he was talking about.
I loathe cockroaches. They don't frighten me but, rather, put me in a murderous rage. I'm not talking about whatever roaches you have in your town but the mutant, giant tree-roaches that are everywhere in the Southeast Texas region. If you've ever stepped on one in the middle of the night while getting up to go to the bathroom or had one fly in your face while you're flicking on the light at 3AM to get a glass of water you know of what I speak. The worst is waking up throwing something across a room because one was crawling across your closed, sleeping eyes. (That requires taking a shower after the killing.)
 |
| via YouTube |
"Curiosity finally overcame the Gilbertese. They came out of their hiding places to investigate more closely these new beings and the strange things which they had brought with them. As the story goes, they were especially interested in the slippery, fragrant substance which formed white foam when wet. It is said that several people started biting bits off and soon several became sick. Thus, the first contact with the Europeans had a dramatic ending--the soap victims became the patients of these strange beings.
What this story illustrates, of course, is how really sick and tired people were of eating fish. Nothing else could explain the peculiar urge to eat a bar of soap the had just been used to wash the critter-ridden body funk of a pale and hairy sailor." (p. 114-115)
That's just one snippet of his writing style. Each chapter tells a different story. The description of his first dip in the lagoon. Why he's no longer afraid of sharks. The diet of fish, fish, and fish. His determination to not let ANY Mormon missionary EVER think that he would be interested in what they have to say. The over-kill of La Macarena and his desire to make it stop and how he finally got his neighbors to turn it down. All of this had me cracking up. It's not the most anthropologically correct travel book nor is it an unbiased ethnography of a culture, but it was fun to read and they only mentioned the sex lives of the natives on one page which sounded mildly horrific and painful to me. He does drop the F-bomb a bit so you were warned.
(I feel seriously behind in my weekly posts. I may be the only one who noticed that I haven't written a book review or a General Conference post in several weeks. If you have noticed and wondered what the heck was wrong with the blog, my apologies. Life got in the way.)
No comments:
Post a Comment