Every once in a while, a writer comes along with a voice that makes you wish you knew the author so you could meet him for a drink, congratulate him on his book, and then, when his guard is down, punch him in the cock. For me, that author is J. Maarten Troost. When I refer to cockpunching, I do not mean a polite or friendly kind of cockpunching. I mean a sort of cockpunching that comes from an irrational hatred the puncher himself cannot understand, something primal and atavistic to his nature, bringing up portions of the collective unconscious that remain a mystery to the ages. I mean the Jungian, archetypal reader-to-writer cockpunch.

The problem with this book is that I am genuinely interested in the subject matter, but the author has so overwritten the book with his affected and poorly-edited writing style that the book is actually painful to read. The book flows in a meandering yet pretentious style that makes the order of the paragraphs relatively arbitrary.

It's hard to buy his self-characterization as an aimless adventurer when he describes the college and the apartment he escaped from (expensive) to go abroad and live off his girlfriend, who works for an NGO. The thing is, Washington DC is full of self-important recent Georgetown and GWU foreign studies grads just like this guy. I'm still reading, but mostly in the hope that there's a character in this story who will eventually punch the narrator in the cock.