The Sex Lives of Cannibals...

I give The Sex Lives of Cannibals by J. Maarten Troost the award for having one of the best titles ever. I kept wanting to quote or read bits of it to people. This is my chance: the LJ captive audience.

The books is about the two years Maarten Troost and his girlfriend spent on the island of Tarawa, in the Kirabati Islands. I am pleased to see that the Kiribati National Tourism Office now has a web page, offering "a relaxing simple life". I like their list of activities: Camping & Fishing – bring your own camping and fishing gear - yes, because there is none on the island, even though everyone fishes.

It's non-fiction, and a bit of a hybrid: part memoir, part humour, part environmental editorial, part travel book. Troost, a former journalist in Washington D.C., tells how his career was stagnating in clerical temp jobs, he was bored, and his girlfriend was working in international development.

Suffice it to say that the Washington end of such work can be a mite dispiriting and Sylvia soon began to yearn for the field, which is international development-speak for Third World hellhole. And so we both began applying for jobs in the most miserable places on earth.

So they went to the Republic of Kiribati, pronounced "kir-ee-bas" because, according to Troost, the English missionary who created their alphabet skimped on letters out of spite.

Kiribati is in the equatorial Pacific. The nation covers roughly the area of the continental United States, but is made up of twenty-one inhabited atolls, a land mass about the size of metropolitan Baltimore, says Troost, "though I believe it halves at high tide". ( t has a population of about 80,000 )

As I'm sure you can tell, I enjoyed this book - which, delightful comedy thought it is, is (like all the best comedy) heartbreaking. I couldn't help seeing Tarawa as the world in miniature: a nation of people struggling with overpopulation and illness and pollution and conflict, but making the best of things from one day to the next.