In imitation of Jonathan Swift (as is acknowledged at the front of ["Travels to the Enu"], Jakov Lind shipwrecks his narrator on a remote island, where he is obliged to explain western civilization to the natives and the natives' civilization to his civilized Western reader. He suggests that mankind's prospects are pretty dim…. The narrator has a difficult time explaining to the islanders the power of the written word (that a scribble can trigger mass destruction boggles his own mind), while his account of the causes and effects of their chief affliction—boredom—seems unpleasantly familiar. The natives' treatment of the narrator, alternating between brutality and obeisance, and their own social rites (including the worship of birds, which roost in their coiffures, and the manufacture of edibles from excrement), as well as their earthy English, give Mr. Lind ample opportunity for sadistic and scatological digressions. Sometimes his narrator...