J. Maarten Troost 2004
Hilarious.
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.
While his wife worked, Troost planned to write:
It would be a big book. Tolstoyan in scale, Joycean in its ambition, Shakespearean in its lyricism.
He ended up with this. 🙂
He and his stalwart girlfriend Sylvia spend the next two years battling incompetent government officials, alarmingly large critters, erratic electricity, and a paucity of food options (including the Great Beer Crisis); and contending with a bizarre cast of 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).
AMAZON – The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific
another book by Troost – Lost on Planet China
Rick McCharles 