DSL January Read: Brady's Pick
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre by B. TravenA little bit about the book: "The Treasure of Sierra Madre is the literary masterpiece for America's pop mythology of the Wild West. A savagely ironic novel, it follows the rugged adventure of three Americans hunting for gold in the mountains of Mexico who find themselves caught in a morality tale of greed and betrayal."
And its very, very eccentric author: "For many years the identity of B. Traven has been a mystery. Obsessively protective of his privacy, he refused to be photographed and interviewed. . .He conducted his business by mail from Mexico...There have been several versions of [his] background. One version held that Traven was a German writer held in high esteem in pre-Nazi Germany...Another, more widely held version is that Traven was born in Minnesota or Chicago, of Swedish-American parents. His full name is thought to have been Berick Torsvan Traven. . .he went to sea and later settled in Mexico. . ."
Added bonus: The John Huston film adaptation is freakin' awesome.
posted by mary_m @ 2:31 PM
8 Comments:
I love this book. I'm particularly fond of the really snarky tone.
Great pick, Potts.
I'm down to the last 10 or so pages of the book, and it's starting to get a little...you know...bleak.
Finished it over the weekend. I loved it overall, though I was slightly confused by the ending--it seemed to just sort of end a little abruptly.
I didn't get the sense the guy hates people, but rather than he is totally cynical about the effects of wealth on the human spirit. It was interesting because the book seemed very specific to its time, and yet totally applicable to today's global capitalism.
The foreword to my edition said that this was his best book, as later his support of communism took over and his writing became too strident and propagandist.
Alrighty, I'm about 60 pages in. Finally found my copy yesterday.
I like this one a lot, and fortunately don't remember much about the plot from the movie, other than that it ends badly and that Bogey is tough in it.
Along those lines, one thing I'm noticing so far is that Traven has a really interesting way of doing hyper-masculinity. There's not this cult and code of the manly man, like in Hemingway. And there's nothing romantic about their situation. "Enduring" or whatever doesn't make them more stoically masculine.
I can't really think of another example of male toughness in literature that isn't weighted down with affectation or symbolism. It just is.
I like it.
Man, this is a lot different from the movie. I'm reading the last few pages and some stuff has happened that I did not expect to happen. With machetes.
On another note, loved this part:
"Men feel sorry about a thousand lives lost by a shipwreck... But the same men will rage like savages for vengeance if only twenty persons have been willfully murdered by bandits for purely material reasons."
Of course, everything after "will rage like savages if only" could be replaced by:
a) prostitutes are murdered by a serial killer
b) little white girls are kidnapped
c) someone famous doesn't wear undies
Another line I loved:
"Yet he would not have been a true American had he not longed for a change, whether for better or worse."
Allright. Time for me to weigh in on this, my pick. Which was picked when I was all of thirty pages in, but happily (as far as I'm concerned) did not suck at all, but turned out to be quite good. Woot.
I really dug it.
For one, it nails the intersection of Marx's critique of capital and psychology in a way that sociologists have been trying and failing to do for many years, so that's cool. And it does it without descending into "Money bad!".
I would also think that Gwen might find the book particularly interesting since she's about to move to Vegas, aka the Neon Madre.
I don't know how Travers did it, but Dobbs is a despicable jackass in most ways, yet I still hoped he'd pull his head out of his burro long enough to see reason and have a happy ending. I know Mary plugged the movie version, which like To Kill a Mockingbird is one of those rare instances where both are really great, but I'd like to second her and add that Bogie really plays the hell out of Dobbs.
A little writing type thing that I dug: The constant digressions into "gold fever" stories, while our (anti)heroes are in the middle of the exact kind of cautionary tale they spend their evenings telling. It reminded me of a very very much bleaker version of this Tim Gatreaux short story in which a bunch of people sit around telling stories over a hand of cards.
I've got more, but I'll have to think about it for a bit...
The last third or so of the book was like watching a train wreck coming that you can't possibly stop--you keep hoping Dobbs won't be as bad as you think, and you hope there'll somehow be a happy ending, but you have this impending sense of doom. It was almost painful to finish it in a certain way.
Which doesn't mean I didn't like it--I thought it was fantastic. I just don't know if, had I written it, I would have had the heart for that ending.
What's our February pick?
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