Word: banana
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...Kael [the New Yorker critic], Morgenstern [ Newsweek ] and Hollis Alpert [ Saturday Review ] were all in one room in New York watching the picture last night. I nearly had a heart attack..." He started to lean over, his eyes bright and watery: "Is that a banana split or isn't it?" He paused and looked down at his feet, then looked up and said, in imitation of the manner of Busby Berkeley heroes: "Man, that's box office...
...either so don't get any smart ideas." Then follow jokes about Montclair, paranoia, penis-envy. On one hand, it must be cunning to hear rats talk this way in an over-sized nursery. On the other, the lines exploit the old convention of laughing at the words "elephant," "banana," "belly dancer" and "Beverly Hills-men-tality...
Gabriel Garcia Márquez spent the first eight years of his life in Aracataca, a steamy banana town not far from the Colombian coast. "Nothing interesting has happened to me since," he has said. His experiences there were eventually transformed into a tenderly comic novel, just published in the U.S. after three years of enormous success in Latin America. It has survived export triumphantly. In a beautiful translation, surrealism and innocence blend to form a wholly individual style. Like rum calentano, the story goes down easily, leaving a rich, sweet burning flavor behind...
First civil war, then a railroad and a huge, U.S.-owned banana plantation gradually penetrate the town's isolation and open it to dissension and prosperity. Six generations of Buendias, all touched with fantasy and fatalism, all condemned to fundamental solitude, are born and die, often violently. Just before the family line ends in disaster, Macondo is almost abandoned, the banana farms destroyed by nearly five years of rain. Only the red-light district remains active. Finally, an inexplicable cyclone erases the town and the family...
Indeed, the whole enchanted continent, originally colonized by white men in pursuit of El Dorado and the Fountain of Youth, is encapsulated in Macondo. The only trace of the Protestant ethic in the town is the operation of the U.S banana company-and the "gringos" are plainly mean, greedy, and probably crazy too. The Buendias, on the other hand, are inspired mainly by the magic in life. They see no limit of human potential, mostly because natural miracles abound-a plague of insomnia, showers of dead birds or yellow flowers, the arrival of death as a lady in blue. When...