Word: banana
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...composition, but he never seemed able to integrate this talent with Marguerite Duras' rather somnolent script. Robbe-Grillet, on the other hand wrote novels that yearned for visual expression. In La Jalousie, for instance, he spends most of his time painting in the very smallest details of a banana plantation. Amid the minutiae, the author tells an exceedingly ambiguous tale of a husband's jealousy, a tale that never quite escapes from the encroaching landscape drawn in so heavily that it overshadows all else...
...Cult of Chosisme. To re-educate the reflexes and the expectations of readers, Robbe-Grillet has established a writing credo which has been called chosisme ("thingishness"). In extreme moments, thingishness runs to steady repetition of precise, often geometrical descriptions of anything from a razor blade to a banana plantation. U.S. moviegoers have been subjected to the incantatory power of the Robbe-Grillet technique in the off-screen commentary he wrote for the narrator in Last Year at Marienbad (for some it had a soporific monotony). Objects are important to Robbe-Grillet in themselves, but also in relation to people...
...that its competitors did not have to contend with. Since its founding in 1899. United Fruit had built a welfare system for its Latin American workers that included 188 schools and 16 hospitals, cost $4,000,000 a year to run. Unlike its latter-day competitors, who buy their bananas from independent producers. United Fruit also had vast fixed investments in banana lands, workers' housing and rail lines to haul the fruit. Between 1957 and 1960, as the company's sales dropped from $342 million to $304 million, these pressures shrank its per-share earnings from...
Reaching Out. As United Fruit's fortunes darkened, the company's directors, led by their newly elected chairman, Boston Investment Banker George Peabody Gardner Jr., 44, desperately reached outside the banana business to find a president who would remake the company. Their choice: Thomas Elbert Sunderland, 54, previously vice president and general counsel of Standard Oil of Indiana...
Sunderland found himself at the head of an empire which, besides banana lands in eight tropical American countries, included cattle ranches, thousands of acres in sugar cane, cacao and oil palm, 1,380 miles of railroads, 55 ships, a sugar refinery and a communications network (Tropical Radio Telegraph Co.). He also found himself saddled with a chaotic organization in which three men might be working on the same project without being aware of each other's existence. The company also suffered from memories of the freewheeling days when it was run by the late Sam ("The Banana Man") Zemurray...