Word: thorkild
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Danish Banker Thorkild Kristiansen and his wife Jette were amazed to find that food and gasoline cost half as much in the U.S. as back home. "If the dollar continues at its current level," says Kristiansen, "we'll be back next year. Only this time we'll bring our two children...
Many people dream of escaping the world and fleeing to some unspoiled tropical isle. Most of them settle for a couple of weeks in the Hamptons or a package tour to Puerto Rico. Not Gunnar Thorkild, the half-Polynesian, half-European hero of Morris West's latest novel. The grandson of a great Polynesian navigator as well as an instructor at the University of Hawaii, Thorkild publishes a paper claiming that even in this day of earth satellites and up-to-date hydrographic charts, there exists in the vastness of the Pacific an island known only to Polynesia...
...Thorkild instead wrecks his boat and maroons himself and his crew, setting up the same situation that William Golding once exploited so skillfully. Indeed, The Navigator might more accurately be called The Lord of the Fleas...
...castaways elect Thorkild chief and play at being survivors, pairing off in various combinations and permutations, cultivating taro and learning how to make stone axes...
...seems to be a compendium of South Sea cliches containing, in addition to the mandatory paean to the Polynesian way of life, a tidal wave, a tropical storm and a run-in with a poisonous stonefish-a great relief to readers who had been expecting a shark. One thing Thorkild proves, though: there is no tenure in paradise...