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P. Gauguin, Reclining Tahitian Women, 1894
It was an obscure language—he’d decided—indigenous to a single tropical archipelago, a languorous hot-weather paradise, a Gauguin painting, blessed with black sand beaches and breadfruit trees and freshwater springs and endowed with an angry, glowing red volcano god and an oral culture rich in obscene expletives.
Lev Grossman, The Magicians
