The peripatetic author of Riding the Iron Rooster, etc., etc.,
ventures with a collapsible kayak to the remote and scattered
islands of the South Pacific. With a farewell to his marriage, and
loneliness at his back, Theroux begins his extraordinary mission in
New Zealand's Fiordland ("As long as there is wilderness there is
hope"), moves on to Australia (a continent "terrified by its own
emptiness"), and then to Melanesia, Polynesia - Samoa, Tonga, Fiji,
Tahiti, New Guinea's Trobriands, etc. - and, finally, Hawaii. He
paddles the sea, he says, in the wake of myth-makers Melville,
Stevenson, Gauguin, Maugham, and the Frenchman Captain
Bougainville, who, in 1768, believed he'd found not only the Garden
of Eden but Venus when a "barebreasted Tahitian girl" climbed into
his ship from a canoe. To keen-eyed Theroux, the Polynesian islands
are "pleasant and feckless" but far from paradise. Even Gauguin's
Marquesas are "dramatic at a distance" but "close up - muddy and
jungly and priest-ridden." Traditional islands are "riddled with
magic, superstition, myths, dangers, rivalries and its old
routines." Always interesting are Theroux's encounters with
archaeologists who have disproved Thor Heyerdahl's popularizing
theories about Polynesia. Sifting through human and animal bones,
they study a still-mysterious people who carved some 800 stone
statues on Easter Island and who boasted navigational skills that
sent them migrating during what was Europe's Dark Ages. A sense of
being beyond the reach of civilization comes when, in his intrepid
kayak, off Easter Island and between the rock-battering surf and
the Pacific, Theroux removes his headphones, "hears the immense mar
of waves and the screaming wind," and is terrified. A vast and
contemplative book, seeing the "Pacific as a universe, and the
islands like stars in all that space." Informative not only for the
voyager, but also for those wanting a new perspective on the
Western continents of home. (Kirkus Reviews)
Paul Theroux invites us to join him on one of his most exotic and
tantalizing adventures exploring the coasts and blue lagoons of the
Pacific Islands, and taking up residence to discover the secrets of
these isles. Theroux is a mesmerizing narrator - brilliant, witty,
keenly perceptive as he floats through Gauguin landscapes, sails in
the wake of Captain Cook and recalls the bewitching tales of Jack
London and Robert Louis Stevenson. Alone in his kayak, paddling to
seldom visited shores, he glides through time and space,
discovering a world of islands, their remarkable people, and in
turn, happiness. 'A sharp, fascinating and highly entertaining book
... Theroux at his best' Daily Telegraph.
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