Troost, J. Maarten

views updated

Troost, J. Maarten

PERSONAL: Married; wife's name, Sylvia; children: one son.

ADDRESSES: Agent—c/o Author Mail, Random House, 1745 Broadway, New York, NY 10014.

CAREER: Writer. Worked as a consultant with World Bank. Has worked in Kirbati in the Equatorial Pacific and Fiji.

WRITINGS:

The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific, Broadway Books (New York, NY), 2004.

Essays have appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, Washington Post, and the Prague Post.

SIDELIGHTS: J. Maarten Troost is the author of the travel book The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific. The book recounts the two years he spent with his girlfriend and future wife on the remote South Pacific island of Tarawa, part of the Republic of Kiribati. Troost thinks he is out for a romantic adventure on a beautiful island where he will also "find himself" and perhaps write a great novel. Instead he finds there are few places to hide from the stifling heat, and the locals have fallen under the spell of Western ways and pollute the beach with dirty diapers. There is no television or coffee, and pigs roam the runways of the local airport. After taking a government job, Troost is soon battling incompetent officials. Further straining his nerves, the locals have adopted "Macarena" as their unofficial national anthem and play it over and over again, driving Troost to blast a jazz CD just to drown out the song.

Writing in Newsweek International, Jeffrey Wasserstrom, noted that in The Sex Lives of Cannibals Troost "skewers the notion that 'civilized' Western ways are always a good thing." Chris Springer commented in International Travel News that the author "offers up some laugh-out-loud passages." In a review in Entertainment Weekly, Nicholas Fonseca felt that the author is not convincing in offering up a history of the island "to rationalize inhabitants' helplessness." However, Fonseca went on to note, "he saves his story with a wicked sense of exasperation at how his supposed South Pacific adventure devolved into a sun-soaked nightmare." A Publishers Weekly contributor called the book "a comic masterwork of travel writing and a revealing look at a culture clash," while Jerry Eberle, writing in Booklist, dubbed the book "a hilarious sardonic travelogue" and wrote, "Troost's mystified admiration for the I-Kiribati people shines through it all."