THE BANANA WARS

Grostephan traces the shifting fortunes of several characters in 1990s Colombia.

History reshapes people’s lives in unforeseen ways. When this novel begins, it’s 1990 in Colombia and the power dynamic is shifting. The first sign of this is a labor action against banana planters—one which finds a man known as Orejas setting an office on fire. Grostephan writes: “Today was not just an insurrection against the planters but a general strike across the country.” But the story being told here quickly becomes ethically and emotionally complex, and its central characters—Orejas among them—are often forced to radically reinvent themselves in order to survive. The danger at play here is most acutely felt through the character of Yenifer, who must navigate local gossip and a butcher with designs on her bakery after the murder of her husband. A company formed in the wake of the strike, Banana Bolívar, gradually grows to occupy the center of the novel. Two businessmen—the Colombian Rafael and the American Jay—have their own brushes with violence and uncertain allegiances to reckon with. Gradually, the borders between factions blur in ways the characters themselves struggle to articulate: “Everyone is blended together,” Orejas tells Jay at one point. The dizzying effect is part of the point, but so are the ways in which different characters’ morals gradually implode. By late in the novel, Orejas himself has reached a particularly bleak point after linking up with a paramilitary unit, declaring that “they would murder the babies first if the people did not collaborate.” It’s a harrowing tale of survival at increasingly brutal costs.

A multifaceted look at a turbulent time in Colombia’s history.