United States of Banana

Giannina Braschi’s United States of Banana puts genre in a blender and pours it with seamless liquidity into a novel of exceptional innovation. Set in post-9/11 New York, the book follows Hamlet, Zarathustra, and Giannina as they set out to free Puerto Rican captive Segismundo from the dungeon of the Statue of Liberty where he has been imprisoned by the king of the United States of Banana for one hundred years. The king remarries, releases Segismundo, and as a conciliatory gesture, offers passports to all Latin American citizens. An act of benevolence which upends the global power paradigm and reverberates through the international community with destabilizing effects.United States of Banana is a hybrid work, mixing post-modern fiction, play format, sociopolitical commentary, and stretches of prose with an evocative carousel of language and philosophical ruminations. It is an English language and literature lover’s dream! Cliché is (or should be) the bain of every writer. In Braschi’s hands cliché becomes critique which repeats and accretes with such intensity that it acquires depth and sinister implications greatly in excess of its daily use. Running around like a chicken with its head cut off catapults the reader into stinging indictments of capitalism and its injurious effects on well … everybody.“…home is in the head – (but the head is cut off) – and the nest is full of banking forms and Easter eggs with coins inside. Beheaded chickens, how do you breed chickens with their heads cut off? By teaching them to bankrupt creativity.”Braschi plays clever havoc with the language around Puerto Rico’s status as a protectorate (de facto colony) of the United States. The statuses are referred to as Wishy, Wishy-Washy, and Washy, independence, protectorate, and statehood respectively. She engages with the question in many ways, but arguably the most unique approach comes from dialogue sequences in play format. My favorite conversation is between Cuba, The Statue of Liberty, Argentina, Puerto Rico, and the United States of Banana during a meeting at the United Nations. Fiction fans who are interested in Latin America and its complex political relationships with the United States must read this.Then there are the places where Braschi eviscerates language and reconstitutes so it is recognizable but released from its moorings. For example, a skull becomes a “prop for glasses.” Or, “I always fulfill my deadlines because they are the lines of death, and I can never skip what was meant to die by deadline. And that is my goal. To die when I get to the deadline.” The magic is as much in what is written as what is held back or implied. United States of Banana is a galloping romp through semantic fields and an invigorating contribution to postmodernism that never loses its sense of irony or humor.

Really good book but the pages are literally falling apart and coming out of the book. No ripping or anything just the binding is failing like a week after I bought it.

United States of Banana is a reflection of postmodern literature. The book discusses the decline of the American Empire after the collapse of the Twin Towers following the terrorist attack in New York City on September 11, 2001. It is a cross-genre work comprised of theatre, fiction, drama, prose poetry, and political philosophy. This edgy work is oddly humorous in a dark way and surprisingly funny during the most serious parts. Braschi’s philosophic texts run parallel to modern thinkers like Byung-Chul Han, Anne Carson, Paul Virilio, Alain Badiou, Noam Chomsky, and Judith Butler. Her fiction compares to other challenging postmodern writers such as David Foster Wallace, Kathy Acker, Roberto Bolano, and Mary Camponegro. This is thought-provoking Latinx literature that is both experimental in style and form. Great read!

Had read several reviews on it and want to read it. The cover is very fragil, but expect the contents to be good. Thanks. Prompt delivery7

Good condition book

I am rather disappointed in this book because it is written in such a peculiar style that I just couldn't get myself to finish it. I almost never leave a book half-read, but this one lost me when the author, the Statue of Liberty, Zarathustra and Hamlet began conversing with each other. It is a very witty book, but the humor and satire require extensive knowledge of "Hamlet," "Thus Spake Zarathustra," as well as knowledge of Puerto Rican culture and history. It would be an interesting book to study for a class, but for general, enjoyable reading I can't recommend it.

I admit it, I'm an English major (or was many years ago) and, as a result, am fairly picky. Usually, my first test of a book is the first sentence. Oddly, this book passed the first sentence test pretty well (the all-time star is the opening sentence of  One Hundred Years of Solitude (P.S.) .The problem with "The United States of Banana" is that it is, as they say, experimental. Specifically, the author is experimenting with story-telling, especially in the area of conversation among characters. The experiment consists of not attributing speeches to specific characters, so the reader has no way of telling which character is speaking. The conversations span dozens of pages without a single indication of who is speaking at any particular moment. As a result, what should be dialog becomes a sort of hypothetical give-and-take between two or more undifferentiated entities. What the author ends up with is about one hundred pages of "dialog" (that is, something set off and separated by quotation marks), but the speeches offer no method of indicating or building character. The fact is, however, stories are about characters. When the author doesn't indicate who's speaking, how do you know which character is which? And how can you discern the "character" of the characters? I hate to give bad marks to such an ambitious novel, but I found it downright unreadable. And I made it through "Ulysses" AND "Moby Dick."While the novel is ambitious, I just couldn't get far enough into it (I couldn't get past about page 130) to discern any of the lofty goals and meaning described by other reviewers.Recommendation: if you're reading this because (a) you're a lit major or (b) you're into American-Hispanic culture, good luck. Give it your best shot. If you're neither of the previous two, I'd give this one a miss. But don't discount the author. She may yet find her footing and turn out to be a great writer. Worth checking in on her work from time to time.

uhm.. cant even talk about how difficult this book is.

I had already gathered from other reviewers that United States Of Banana was going to be a challenging read and I can certainly concur on that point. While I did enjoy aspects of this undeniably original and unique work, other parts left me struggling to keep up with what was going on or just left me standing, bewildered, in Giannina Braschi's wake.The book is written partly in a first person monologue and partly as a play between disparate characters including Hamlet, Zarathustra and the Statue of Liberty. I found I got the most out of the monologues, several of which I thought were politically incisive and deftly portrayed concepts with which I either wholeheartedly agreed or which I had not previously considered so a lot of United States Of Banana did give me food for thought.Where I lost the connection however was where I had no knowledge of the characters the fictional Giannina was interacting with. I have seen pictures of the Statue of Liberty and a production of Shakespeare's Hamlet, but Zarathustra and Segismundo were completely new names to me so I feel I needed to have familiarised myself with their stories before attempting to understand how they fitted into United States Of Banana. The same was true of the ancient Greek philosophers who joined the cast in later chapters. I knew of Socrates and his ideas, but not in sufficient detail and knew pretty much nothing at all of the others. This meant that many of the connections and allusions that are essential to understanding Braschi's ideas sadly sailed straight over my head.On a positive note, I am now keen to remedy these gaps in my knowledge so recommendations of other books, particularly those exploring and explaining Segismundo and Zarathustra will be gratefully received. I'm planning to keep my copy of United States Of Banana, rather than deleting it as I usually do with read books, and giving it another go in due course. There was enough to grip me in the parts I did understand, that I want to have a similar engagement with the whole book.

Mas com certeza não é para todos.

I selected this book because I thought the cover blurb was intriguing.However I didn't last long. After a couple of chapters I decided that this wasn't for me. I was hoping for a readable satirical novel, but couldn't relate to the style at all. It is written in a surreal style that will only appeal to a minority audience. I flicked ahead and saw that throughout the book further unreadable weirdness awaited.Maybe this work does have a deep artistic and intellectual merit. However, if so, it is completely lost on me.Beware - this is not a work that will appeal to mainstream novel reader.

Though wary of anything whose main descriptor is 'cutting edge' I thought I'd give this a spin.The release of prisoner Segismundo, who has languished in prison for a hundred years has unexpectedly seismic implications for the very notion of liberty, and poet and novelist Giannina Braschi uses this fantasy to explore a post 9/11 world and the fracturing of America as it struggles to incorporate a huge influx of Latin American people and culture.Or at least I think she does...However, the ideas of this novel are to me subsumed in an infuriatingly eliptical style that seems obsessed with its own cleverness where each sentence is a post-modern parlour game. An example;'Who would you betray?''I would betray none, except I would betray you for betraying me by asking me to betray'These caprices can be fun and playful, but on every line? on every page?Pretty soon my overiding reaction was 'KNOCK IT OFF!!'This allegorical style and delight in unconventional prose can be a wonder when in the hands of a Pynchon or Rushdie, but here, just like a film who's shaky camerawork is meant to convey 'energy' and 'disorientation' but in fact just makes you sea-sick, this book becomes tiresome pretty quickly.Or maybe I'm just not clever enough, and find myself getting annoyed by someone who seems to be just showing off how clever THEY are.Whatever, the novelist's attempt to mesh the narrative with that of Hamlet is telling.Now there was an author with great ideas, with an extraordinary and inventive grasp of language.I shall have to content myself with being clever enough to enjoy that!

This is a Latin American arty type book. Unfortunately I ordered it because the blurb and cover made me think it was going to be rather more fun and less weighty than it is.The first half of the book has a series of accounts of September 11th, these are graphic and harrowing, and should come with a health warning. Especially for people like my husband who were there. I do wonder if the Author really was, or maybe its just different ways of dealing with tragedy between the Anglo-Saxon and Latin American.The second half is a script, between the Author and Characters including the Statue of Liberty. I have to admit I didn't make it very far, as I had already lost the will to go further in the first half.If you don't like realism, and do like this kind of heavy literature, you may like it. I didn't.