309 pages
Published 1935
Read from October 31 to November 2
Rating: 2.5 out of 5
I first got it into my head to read this book way back in the first year or so of this blog, when I was checking off all the high school lit classics that had escaped me before. The fact that no library in Suffolk County owned a copy, and the difficulty in tracking down a used copy for a reasonable price, lent it an unearned mystique in my overactive imagination. I conceptualized Treasure as a pulp masterpiece on the same level as The Ox-Bow Incident, an exercise in stoic poetry, of weather-worn men tortured by the social constraints of performative masculinity and the violence it entails.
Having finally found myself a used copy, I find the reality of Treasure deflates all those idle speculations. It’s closer in spirit to The Road to El Dorado than it is to Blood Meridian. It’s a rangy satire of pulp adventure fiction, poking fun at the easy glory and masculine mythology of pulp magazines. It’s also an extended meditation on the acidic grip of greed, both on the minds of individual people and on societies built on capitalism. Perhaps it was some garbled hearsay of this that sketched my imaginary understanding of Treasure.
Our heroes, Dobbs and Curtin, are two American men weathering the Great Depression and failing to make a quick buck down in Mexico. In the current parlance, the two of them share a single brain cell. The first section of the book follows their job-hunting misadventures in the oil fields and the jungles — bumming pesos, getting scammed by bosses, hiding in a tree from a beast that turns out to be a burro. Bold adventure this is not. Hell, after introducing Dobbs in the first two pages, the book spends the next ten pages delineating the shittiness of a particular flophouse. Atmospheric digressions seem to make up about half the book.
In the end, of course, there’s betrayal and murder, the descent into paranoia, but the characters stumble into it the way they’ve stumbled into everything else, through the power of suggestion and self-delusion.
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