review - the sex lives of cannibals

“The Sex Lives of Cannibals”
By J. Maarten Troost
(Broadway)

Stop. Quit your day job (or in the case of Maarten Troost, your temp job). Follow your girlfriend as she takes a job on an island in the Equatorial Pacific, where planes held together by duct tape can’t land until pigs are cleared off the runway and the ocean is nothing but one giant toilet for the natives. Troost’s “The Sex Lives of Cannibals” allows everyone who has ever dreamed of running off to a tropical island to live vicariously through him, as he and his girlfriend venture from the save haven of the United States to the island of Kiribati (pronounced Kir-ee-bas).

In his first novel, Troost perfectly captures the ennui of someone who has spent far too much time being educated, without a clue as to what they want to do afterwards. “I chose not to pursue employment in the field for which I had spent many years acquiring knowledge because…because, well, I didn’t really have a good reason” he states early on. So when the opportunity to travel to the other side of the world presents itself, Troost jumps at the chance…and defiantly packs his jeans and a sweater for good measure.

In vivid prose, Troost relates the story of his two years on the atoll as an I-Matang (white person) among I-Kiribati, from the initial culture shock to his slow adaptation to island life: toxic fish, sea sickness, diapers in his backyard and the questionable “cuisine.” (Although lobster is avoided, the mangy island dogs, he discovers, are regarded as particularly “kang-kang” (tasty).) As Troost becomes more entrenched in his life as an islander, he also expounds on the other I-Matang he encounters: the poet laureate of Kiribati, a young British man with questionable literary skills and all the charm of Oasis frontman Liam Gallagher; an ex-hippie surfer who has spent 20 years in the “paradise”; and the dignitaries who insist on wearing (laugh) pants in the stifling heat. His chapters bounce effortlessly from serious topics such as the history of the native peoples, and the effects that American influence has had on the atolls to side-splitting commentary on native scatological superstitions.

Poop, it seems, plays a central role in island life.

Part memoir, part political commentary, part anthropological study on the inhabitants of the equatorial Pacific, and all hilarious, “The Sex Lives of Cannibals” is the perfect summer read for the “what do I do next?” post-college crowd. The island of Tarawa, “a littered, stinking sandbar in the middle of nowhere” may be a far-from-idyllic setting; a place where the average life span is the mid-50’s and the average yearly temperature is double that. But Troost’s hilarious narrative on everything from the copious beer-consumption by the political leaders to the native peoples’ inexplicable love of “La Macarena” makes the islands of Kiribati seem positively…well, if not Edenic, at least entertaining.