The Sex Lives of Cannibals by J. Maarten Troost

I enjoyed this book though it wasn't quite what I expected. It was fun and light reading and taught about a culture with whom I was not familiar. I just bought the sequel. Getting Stoned with Savages. His writing style is one I enjoy.


The book follows Troost through two years of life on a South Pacific island; Tarawa, an island of the Republic of Kiribati. He headed there with the belief that it was a hopelessly romantic thing to do...


What he really found was disillusionment: bugs, heat, danger...you name it. I still laugh out loud when thinking of the bug incident he wrote up in one of his books. 

Here's a bit of the blurb from the back of the book:


"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).


If you've ever though of moving to a tropical island or you've just had any really, really bad vacations...you might enjoy reading this book. 


(I read this in Jan 2007 and did not note whether it includes any gratuitous sex or language.)


Troost's follow-up project is "Getting Stoned with Savages" in which he chronicles his time on Vanuatu and then Fiji.