About J. Maarten Troost
J. Maarten Troost is a travel writer who specializes in making readers laugh at his misfortunes while secretly wishing they could trade places with him. Born in the Netherlands and raised in Canada, Troost decided the best way to avoid a real job was to move to the most remote place he could find. This led him to the Pacific Islands, where he proceeded to bumble his way through adventures that became the basis for his hilariously self-deprecating books.
Troost's first book, The Sex Lives of Cannibals, chronicles his two years on the tiny atoll of Kiribati. Despite the salacious title, the book contains disappointingly little cannibalism and arguably even less sex. What it does offer is a witty account of a man completely out of his element, struggling with heat, bureaucracy, and the occasional beer shortage.
His follow-up works, including Getting Stoned with Savages and Lost on Planet China, continue the tradition of Troost throwing himself into unfamiliar cultures and emerging with entertaining tales of culture shock and misadventure. He has a knack for finding himself in ridiculous situations, whether it's accidentally attending a circumcision ceremony or trying to navigate Beijing's traffic on a bicycle.
Troost's writing style can be described as equal parts Bill Bryson and Anthony Bourdain, with a dash of Hunter S. Thompson thrown in for good measure. He's the kind of author who makes you feel better about your own travel mishaps, while simultaneously inspiring you to book a one-way ticket to somewhere you can't pronounce.
The Sex Lives of Cannibals, by J. Maarten Troost
At 26, J. Maarten Troost stood at a crossroads and made an unconventional choice: ditch the conventional career path and escape to a remote Pacific paradise. In The Sex Lives of Cannibals, Troost recounts persuading his adventurous girlfriend Sylvia to join him for two years on Tarawa, a tiny atoll in the Republic of Kiribati. The couple envisioned an idyllic island sanctuary but discovered something far more chaotic—unrelenting heat, swarms of insects, questionable aircraft, and waters resembling garbage dumps rather than pristine lagoons. Troost's days became an absurd routine of dodging feral dogs, eating fish at every meal, deciphering the mystery of "island time," and puzzling over local obsessions like a grainy videotape of "Dallas." While Sylvia found meaningful work, Troost mastered the art of not losing his mind, his adventures swinging from hilarious to heartwarming as he fell for this eccentric place and its people.
J. Maarten Troost, The Sex Lives of Cannibals
“The longer we spent on Tarawa the more Sylvia and I came to realize that to live on Tarawa is to experience a visceral form of bipolar disorder. There is the ecstatic high, when you find yourself swept away in a lagoonside maneaba rumbling to the frenzied singing and dancing of hundreds of rapturous islanders. And there are the crushing lows, when you succumb to a listless depression, brought about by the unyielding heat, sporadic sickness, pitiless isolation, food shortages, and the realization that so much of what ails Tarawa, the overpopulation and all its attendant health and social problems, need not be as bad as it is.”
Recommended Books by J. Maarten Troost
Recommended Books by J. Maarten Troost
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