This book catches everyone's attention with its title, taken from Darwin's exaggerated account of Captain's Cook's first interaction with the Maori people. The book tells two stories: one is of the author falling in love with a Maori man while doing post-graduate research in New Zealand, and the other is of the explorers of the 17th and 18th centuries and their interactions with the indigenous people of New Zealand. The parallel is well-done.
Thompson did a good job balancing both stories. Her own life is fascinating, as she and her eventual husband adjust to life together while they are living all over the world. The historical pieces held my attention equally - Thompson uses a combination of letters, historical documents, and other books to put together a coherent and reasonably complete account of several hundreds' years worth of interactions between Europeans and Maoris. And I wasn't bored.
Earlier this year I read Paradise Lost and that was an interesting background for this book. The tragedies on Pitcairn Island detailed in Paradise Lost had their genesis in the clash between Europeans and indigenous people - a theme Thompson returns to several times in her narrative. Another point of reference I had was Hulme's The Bone People, which I had read several years ago - the fictional account of a small group of Maori. Thompson's description of her husband and his extended family didn't come right out of The Bone People but was not inharmonious with it either. Together, these three books were interesting to think of together in learning a little something about that part of the world.
Even taken alone, Thompson's book was a good read - serious scholarly work to be sure, but also personal, making a good combination.
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Hi Sheryl,
Thank you for giving me this book. I really enjoyed it. I just wish that the author had let us into her own life a little more. I also wish she tied up her discussions of Maori history, her family history and the little description of Native American history. It seemed like she was exploring the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized and how it impacts her relationship with her husband and her children but I never felt like it came to any sort of a conclusion.
It was one of the first books I enjoyed but did not feel like I was going to miss the characters when I finished it. I thought it was interesting that you described the book as, "An American woman falls in love a Maori man while in New Zealand studying." I don't know that she ever mentioned "love" in relationship to her husband. That's how far away she kept us from her own personal experiences.
I'm curious to know about Polynesian languages. In the 17th century a Tahitian man was used as a translator between the Maori and the British. And then Seven could understand what the Hawaiian women were saying about him at work. It's fascinating to think that groups of people that were separated for hundreds of years speak mutually intelligible languages.
Looking forward to "In the Land of Invented Languages."
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