Fombombo

Thomas Strawbridge is an American salesman with a simple mission: sell guns to the Venezuelan government. He arrives believing business is business, that profit has no politics, that the revolution sweeping the country is just noise in a land of "fombombos", fools. But Venezuela in the early twentieth century is a powder keg, and Strawbridge's comfortable assumptions about his own cleverness, his country's reach, and the nature of the deal he's striking begin to unravel in ways he never anticipated. Stribling, who would later win the Pulitzer for his Alabama trilogy, wrote this novel as a sharp, often darkly funny portrait of American naivety abroad, the businessman who sees only opportunity where others see history, revolution, and the high cost of foreign interference. The title itself is a Venezuelan slur, and Strawbridge wears it better than he knows. This is a novel about the collision of empires, the stupidity of the confident, and the revolutions, both political and personal, that expose the fool in everyone.