Money to Burn

Hi everyone! Welcome back to my blog;) I hope you all have being enjoying this weather as much as I have.

This week’s reading was a nice change from the usual story lines we have read so far. I’d describe it as captivating crime thriller that kept me on my toes. I’m not usually an action genre lover but this book felt like an exception. Unlike some of the other books we read, I didn’t really find myself relating to the characters. A lot of them had very questionable morals and were quite violent.

I had a hard time understanding some of the themes in this novel. For one, it seemed like the value of money was a lot more complicated towards the group. After the robbery, there was one quote that stuck out to me. “Money is just the same as drugs: what’s fundamental is it’s possession, knowing it’s there, touching it… (p. 30). I think this is interesting and points to how getting money is addictive just like drugs. It’s not always what you can do with it but the power you hold when you have it. Money may also have a psychological and emotional significance for people which leads people to desire it. This theory could be applied to why even billionaires never feel like they have enough money. This is shown also by how the group burns the money on purpose. All that risk, death, and energy just to burn the whole purpose of the robbery?! I think the fact that they burned the money had a bigger impact on me as the reader. I also think you could interpret this as the goal was not to get rich but to perhaps cause havoc and disrupt the norm. There are themes of class inequality throughout so maybe this was a way to make a statement about the wealthy and the lower classes. 

I also found there to be themes of struggle and conflict between law enforcement and the group. The boys have a real hatred towards the police in the novel. Gaucho hated them more than anything and killed them at any chance. He thought that if he kept killing them, the police would have to think twice about their role as “public executioners”. The novel says though that killing like that in cold blood gives the opposite message to the police. It confirms their beliefs about people like them; that they are criminals and would never follow the law. 

Question: What other areas in the novel did you notice the theme of conflict between the citizen and law enforcement?