Word: spiced
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...spice up your marriage. If you've got one maybe one and a half chili peppers on the Mexican menu of sex, just be happy with that. Because trying to spice up your marriage is one of the most depressing, sex-drive-suppressing experiences possible. Being assigned this story was the best form of birth control I have ever tried...
...talents toward fiction, most reporters?particularly foreign correspondents?are undermined by the very expertise that lends authority to their dispatches. Rather than creating flesh-and-blood characters, they often produce stick figures representing various factions and points of view, who hold forth in preachy, predictable allegories. Yet in The Spice Garden, his debut novel, Michael Vatikiotis, editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review, has constructed an engrossing narrative of mass hysteria and mob violence set in the Maluku archipelago, Indonesia's spice islands, during the horrific bloodbath that swept across the area...
...Spice Garden should be notable, if for no other reason, as the first serious novel in English about the sectarian violence in Indonesia after the fall of Suharto. Vatikiotis solves one of the main problems facing the journalist-novelist by cutting himself free from actual events and creating an imaginary spice island he names Noli. He even invents for it a spice?"a hairy nut the size of a plum that stubbornly refused to grow anywhere else...
...plot of The Spice Garden revolves around the friendship between the leaders of the island's two communities: Father Xavier Lunas, a Catholic priest, and Ghani, a Falstaffian hotelier and fish merchant. At the beginning of the novel, a wedding is being planned between a Muslim boy and a Christian girl. The social cataclysms that have begun to rack Indonesia are felt here only as faraway echoes, until a boatload of survivors of gruesome atrocities in strife-torn Ambon, the capital of Maluku, washes up on Noli's shores. Soon afterward, a gang of jihadist rabble-rousers arrives, with...
...Debatable Land was published in 2001, has a remarkable gift for evoking the sights and scents of the Tropics. Unsparing in his portrayal of the violence of the era, Vatikiotis is admirably evenhanded in his attempts to elucidate the social forces that underlay it. For the most part, The Spice Garden avoids the usual plague of the journalistic novel of crudely putting exposition and argument in the mouths of its characters. The friendship between Father Xavier and Ghani is well rendered and has the ring of truth. Vatikiotis' writing style is polished and evocative, despite occasional patches of purple that...