Books from Kiribati

2 books from and about Kiribati: what each is about, the plot, and a note from Professor Kogi.

In Search of Tusitala

Gavin Bell

Original language: English · paperback · ISBN 978-0330342452

Gavin Bell, a long-standing admirer of Robert Louis Stevenson, follows the Scottish writer's Pacific voyages of the late 1880s and early 1890s. The title comes from the Samoan name given to Stevenson, Tusitala, meaning teller of tales. Bell travels to the same scattered island communities, more than a century after Stevenson passed through them. Stevenson settled in Samoa in his final years.

The route covers French Polynesia, Hawaii, Kiribati, and Samoa, crossing both Polynesia and Micronesia. These are places separated by long stretches of open ocean, where atolls sit only a few metres above sea level and travel between islands still depends on boats and infrequent flights. Kiribati, which straddles the equator, remains among the hardest of these places to reach.

In Hawaii he meets a man who owns one of the finest private collections of Stevenson material. Elsewhere he listens for traces of the island cultures that once fascinated the writer, and finds them fading rather than fixed. The book works as travel account and literary search at once, setting Stevenson's later years against the landscapes and communities Bell records on the way.

Plot

Gavin Bell, for many years an admirer of Stevenson and his work, retraces Stevenson's passage through the more remote communities of French Polynesia, Hawaii, Kiribati, and Samoa. On his tour through Polynesia and Micronesia, he finds haunting echoes of a fading culture that enchanted Stevenson, and in Hawaii finds a man who possesses one of the finest private Stevenson collections.

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The Sex Lives of Cannibals

J. Maarten Troost

Original language: English · paperback · ISBN 978-0767915304

At twenty-six, J. Maarten Troost had collected graduate degrees he found little use for and cycled through a string of temporary jobs. Restless and without direction, he left for Tarawa, a coral atoll in the Republic of Kiribati, drawn by the romance of going to the far edge of the map. What he found was an environment that tested nearly every comfort he had taken for granted.

Troost's account of his two years on Tarawa covers the practical realities of atoll life in sharp, comic detail. Tarawa is a narrow strip of land in the central Pacific, densely populated and far from reliable supply lines. He describes polluted lagoon water, erratic electricity, few food options, constant heat, and oversized insects, alongside a cast of residents and expatriates including a self-declared poet laureate who has never written a poem.

The book belongs to a strand of travel writing that finds its material in discomfort rather than scenery. Troost presents Kiribati less as a tropical paradise than as a place shaped by isolation, thin infrastructure, and the distance between outsider expectations and daily routine. Tarawa is also known internationally as the site of a Second World War battle fought in November 1943.

Plot

At the age of twenty-six, Maarten Troost—who had been pushing the snooze button on the alarm clock of life by racking up useless graduate degrees and muddling through a series of temp jobs—decided to pack up his flip-flops and move to Tarawa, a remote South Pacific island in the Republic of Kiribati. He was restless and lacked direction, and the idea of dropping everything and moving to the ends of the earth was irresistibly romantic. He should have known better. The Sex Lives of Cannibals tells the hilarious story of what happens when Troost discovers that Tarawa is not the island paradise he dreamed of. Falling into one amusing misadventure after another, Troost struggles through relentless, stifling heat, a variety of deadly bacteria, polluted seas, and toxic fish—all in a country where the only music to be heard for miles around is “La Macarena.” 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).

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More from Kiribati

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