The Sex Lives of Cannibals by J Maarten Troost

Author:J Maarten Troost
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781407069203
Publisher: Transworld

CHAPTER 12

In which the Author discovers, while rolling in a swell, Sunburned and Stinging with Sea Lice, and circled by a very large Thresher Shark, which, contrary to his nature, he was trying to catch, that the Pacific Ocean is a Very Great Thing Indeed.

THERE IS A moment, shortly after you accept the imminence of your demise, when it occurs to you that you could be elsewhere, that if you had simply left the house a little later or lingered over a coconut, you would not be here right now confronting your own mortality. This thought occurred to me just as I encountered a very large wave, a rare wave, a surprising wave, a wave that really had no business being where it was, pitching and howling, leaving me with a fraction of a second to make a decision. The options were not good.

Ahead, I could see Mike paddling his surfboard furiously up the face of the wave. Mike had lived on Tarawa for seventeen years. Mike was not a normal guy. He had arrived all those years ago with his wife, Robin, a renowned artist from New Zealand who was seeking both a new motif for her work and the opportunity to bring a few I-Kiribati souls into the Baha’i faith. And so, like me, Mike found himself living on Tarawa more or less as an accessory to his wife. He had taught in every school on Tarawa and was currently working as an administrative aide at the New Zealand High Commission, but his world revolved around surfing and books. If a book arrived on Tarawa it would soon be in Mike’s hands, and this made him very valuable as a source for reading material. We often had deep and lively discussions about the books we read.

“What did you think of Midnight’s Children?” he would ask.

“I thought it was pretty good.”

“It was baroque drivel,” he would inform me. “What about Infinite Jest?”

“I really liked it.”

“It was the most profoundly disappointing book I have ever read.”

I decided that under no circumstances would I ever let him read a word I had written. Unfortunately, just days after the Washington Post published an article of mine, an article that I dearly wished would never be read in Kiribati, because it was a fusion of two separate articles which had been conjoined by the editor so that it became, in his words, “a Frankenstein-like monster sent lumbering into the world,” Mike stormed into the house with a copy. It had been faxed to the high commission by the New Zealand Embassy in Washington. “What kind of hack work is this?” he demanded.

Sigh.

As a source for books, Mike always tried to be helpful. “I think you should read this,” he proposed, handing me Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes. This particular book is about a guy who really wants to be a novelist, but instead of becoming a novelist he becomes a loser alcoholic living a sad, sad life.

“Thanks, Mike,” I told him afterward. “I really enjoyed that one.

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