Getting Stoned with Savages, by J. Maarten Troost

I must have a highly developed sense of schadenfreude because I love travel books written by the accident prone and the naive. Which is why I’ve enjoyed J. Maarten Troost’s books about his life in the South Pacific so much. Troost also has a gift that I’ve noticed with certain British writers. The man can turn a phrase and he’s wonderfully sardonic.

Getting Stoned with Savages is Troost’s follow-up to his first book, The Sex Lives of Cannibals.  Cannibals documented the two years he spent on Kiribas. Savages is about his life on Vanuatu and Fiji with his wife and first son. In it, he encounters some wonderful intoxicants, foot long centipedes, a cyclone,  the aftermath of a coup on Fiji, and parenthood.

Unlike a lot of travel books, Troost shows you the non-tourist side of these islands. In fact, he tends to shun the touristy spots. Instead, he tries to find people who either were cannibals or witness cannibalism and spends a lot (a lot) of time drinking kava with his neighbors and becoming one with the dirt.

Troost spends some time at the beginning and end of this book reflecting on escapism and his need to escape the American way of life or, more specifically, escaping the American work life. It makes him itchy, apparently, and long to be somewhere where happiness is easier to achieve–probably because you’re knocking yourself back down a few rungs on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

The Lost Cosmonaut, by Daniel Kalder

I have mixed feelings about reading The Lost Cosmonaut: Observations of an Anti-Tourist, by Daniel Kalder. There were a lot of things I liked. I really enjoyed that I got to tag along on Kalder’s trips to places that, according to a New York Times review I read when the book first came out, even Russians haven’t heard of. This is why I read travel books in the first place. This book also had the added benefit of some philosophy about places we have never heard of. For example, there’s this bit on page 24 of the trade paperback version, where Kalder talks about discovering the cultural figures of these places:

The existence of these invisible geniuses disturbs me. We take no notice of their music, their books, their causes, or their history, altough they are and it is European. But it’s unknown, a whole other Europe, a shadow Europe, that does not exist for us…I know people are reguarly tortured and murdered for causes I’ve never heard of. So the existence of ghost canons and traditions shouldn’t really disturb me at all. But it does. I shiver when I think about them. They are a mystery, an existential riddle I cannot solve.

It’s a little trite to say that this book really made me think. But it did. There are so few books that I read that I really think expand my consciousness and make me think about all the other billions of people on the planet and what their lives are like.

Kalder also has a really odd sense of humor that appeals to me. One of my favorite bits is this one, where Kalder’s friends have gone off to visit a Kalmykian Buddhist temple: “I preferred to sit on a bench and observe the emptiness. That, and not Buddhism, was what I had come for” (111). I am sure this little funny was entirely deliberate, but I like those moments in a book when the reader and the person who wrote the book–as opposed to the narrator persona–get to share a laugh.

But I get mixed feelings about this book around the beginning of the second half. After a while, the author really struck me as kind of a putz. And you know how hard it is to enjoy a trip with someone you don’t like? Who doesn’t enjoy the same things you do? It felt like this after a while. I stuck with it, hoping that Kalder (or the version of him in the book) would stop being so snide and world-weary. That didn’t happen, unfortunately.

The first two parts of the book are good. They’re odd and funny, and I learned a lot about parts of the world that I would never have heard of otherwise. But the last two parts of the book, well, I still learned things, but I didn’t enjoy it near as much.

Lost Cosmonaut, by Daniel Kalder

I think I read reviews for more books that I could ever possibly read in my life time.

Here’s a fun one I read about on the Guardian’s web site a couple of days ago, Lost Cosmonaut, by Daniel Kalder. The review says that Kalder’s book discusses places in Russia that Russians haven’t even heard about, let alone Americans. (Hurry and read this review before it falls off whatever archived page it’s on.) Basically, Kalder is an anti-Tourist, who goes places to right-minded vacationer would ever dream of going. My image of it is like Bill Bryson but in more exotic locales.

Enjoy.