#trust by hernan diaz

[realitys-ex]

A Mediocre Review of "Trust" by Hernan Diaz

So...this is an interesting book.

Lets get some core stuff out of the way for it: It was published in 2022, and won multiple awards, and it is understandable exactly why!

The story was cleverly told, the indipendent portions were in conversation with eachother (to be clarified later), the style shifts were strong, which I love, and seemed to have something valuable to say! (whether or not a book actually has something of value to say I think depends on the reader)

Overall, I give it an 8/10!

Now to brass tacks, which may or may not be a spoiler depending on ones view (also, note: I went into this book completely blind beyond: 'Read it' so I have no idea how much of this is usually told to people).

The book is divided into 4 parts, with various names underneath each portion (eventually you find out that the name is the presumable author).

The first portion is in a fairly dry style, and it tells of 2 people: A man who cares for practically nothing, but finds he loves the stock market for itself, is brilliant with it, and is intstrumental to the boom in the early 20s, and predicted the collapse in 29 early enough to make money off of it. And his young wife who is also brilliant even more so, but given more to literature, philanthropy, etc.

The second portion is written as a half finished autobiography: It tells of similar individuals, major life events are the same, but their care is deeper. The man isn't purely obsessed with the stock market for it's own sake, but believes that it is an ultimate good. The woman's life is far less tragic than the one in the first part. This portion has far more detail, the characters are more sympathetic and 3 dimensional.

The third portion is an old woman reviewing certain portions of her life, and it turns out, she was hired by the man to help him write the autobiography, because he was so infuriated by the lies in the first one (which was presented as a novel by clearly about him), that he needed it to be addressed. It more focuses on personalities, on actual life, as well as describing what the man actually said, before he had her edit it out of his "auto"biography.

The fourth portion is segments from the wife's journal, recounting a few of the major points from the narrative from her point of view, revealing the 'Truth'.

Now, here is the problem with the book: The details/plots of the first 2 and the fourth portion are irrelevant. There is no actual reason for it to be about a stockbroker. There is no need for it to have unwound the way it did. There is no true plot in those stories as a whole.

If it had been about a career politician, an Oil Barron, a theoretically over influential movie producer, the story would have been the same.

All that was required was that the Man be someone powerful enough yet semi reclusive that the rumor mills could go, that he be very good at his profession, that the wife be intelligent, and that they be involved in major nation impacting events (for both good and ill).

The 'plot' of the stories is just place settings for the 4-way conversation, and while the 4-way conversation is a delight, it's plot without being plot made me feel unsatisfied.

(The third portion, being to me the core, did require the details it had, but it's conversation with the others is of a different enough style that my point stands. At least, I think so.)

As well, I feel that he was weaker with some of styles than others, such that the enjoyability of reading each section was fairly uneven, though that may just be a 'me' thing.

In all, I feel it is a good book from an 'academic' standpoint: If you like clever stories, interesting literary techniques, etc. you'll love it!

But from a plot perspective it fell very flat.

[traveltherightroad]

Trust by Hernan Diaz remains the best book* published in the last 5 years**

*fiction

**that I've read

[self-made-cages]

I gave a book that I almost DNF’ed at the halfway point 4.5 stars… the woman was too stunned to speak 😮

[charlott2n]

[iamnotathornbird]

[oldyears]

i love you aquarius season

[nakedinashes]

books cristina read in 2023: trust - hernan diaz

“Nothing more private than pain. It can only involve one. But who? Who is “I” in “I hurt”? The one who inflicts the pain or the one who suffers it? And does “hurt” refer to the inflicting or the suffering?”

[shivtomdivorce]

deeply enjoy when i have to look up a bunch of words while reading yess let me expand my vocabulary

[haveyoureadthispoll]

Even through the roar and effervescence of the 1920s, everyone in New York has heard of Benjamin and Helen Rask. He is a legendary Wall Street tycoon; she is the daughter of eccentric aristocrats. Together, they have risen to the very top of a world of seemingly endless wealth—all as a decade of excess and speculation draws to an end. But at what cost have they acquired their immense fortune? This is the mystery at the center of Bonds, a successful 1937 novel that all of New York seems to have read. Yet there are other versions of this tale of privilege and deceit. Hernan Diaz’s TRUST elegantly puts these competing narratives into conversation with one another—and in tension with the perspective of one woman bent on disentangling fact from fiction. The result is a novel that spans over a century and becomes more exhilarating with each new revelation. At once an immersive story and a brilliant literary puzzle, TRUST engages the reader in a quest for the truth while confronting the deceptions that often live at the heart of personal relationships, the reality-warping force of capital, and the ease with which power can manipulate facts.

[sublecturas]

“Fortuna”, de Hernán Diaz

[wellesleybooks]

The Pulitzer Prize winners were announced yesterday, amazingly there were two novels chosen for the award for fiction.

Pulitzer Awards for Books, Drama and Music

Fiction

"Demon Copperhead," by Barbara Kingsolver (Harper)

"Trust," by Hernan Diaz (Riverhead Books)

Finalist:

"The Immortal King Rao," by Vauhini Vara (W. W. Norton & Company)

Drama

"English," by Sanaz Toossi

Finalists:

"On Sugarland," by Aleshea Harris

"The Far Country," by Lloyd Suh

History

"Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power," by Jefferson Cowie (Basic Books)

Finalists:

"Seeing Red: Indigenous Land, American Expansion, and the Political Economy of Plunder in North America," by Michael John Witgen (Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture/University of North Carolina Press)

"Watergate: A New History," by Garrett M. Graff (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster)

Biography

"G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century," by Beverly Gage (Viking)

Finalists:

"His Name is George Floyd," by Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa (Viking)

"Mr. B: George Balanchine’s 20th Century," by Jennifer Homans (Random House)

Memoir or Autobiography

"Stay True," by Hua Hsu (Doubleday)

Finalists:

"Easy Beauty: A Memoir," by Chloé Cooper Jones (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster)

"The Man Who Could Move Clouds: A Memoir," by Ingrid Rojas Contreras (Doubleday)

Poetry

"Then the War: And Selected Poems, 2007-2020," by Carl Phillips (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Finalists:

"Blood Snow," by dg nanouk okpik (Wave Books)

"Still Life," by the late Jay Hopler (McSweeney’s)

General Nonfiction

"His Name is George Floyd," by Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa (Viking)

Finalists:

"Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern," by Jing Tsu (Riverhead Books)

"Sounds Wild and Broken: Sonic Marvels, Evolution’s Creativity, and the Crisis of Sensory Extinction," by David George Haskell (Viking)

"Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and on the Health of Our Nation," by Linda Villarosa (Doubleday)

Music

"Omar," by Rhiannon Giddens and Michael Abels

Finalists:

"Monochromatic Light (Afterlife)," by Tyshawn Sorey

"Perspective," by Jerrilynn Patton

[notthatitreallymatters]

He had, perhaps against his doctrines and even his own will, encompassed my entire world and endowed it with meaning and something resembling lawfulness, however precarious this last term might have been when applied to him. His was such a confident chaos. Over time and through a mysterious transmutation I had derived a sense of safety from all that was erratic and unstable in our life together.

Trust - Hernan Diaz

[i-am-the-page-turner]

"Trust" by Hernan Diaz.

"Trust" by Hernan Diaz is a captivating novel that tells the story of a young man's journey through the American West in the mid-19th century. The protagonist, a Swedish immigrant named Achille, finds himself entangled in a series of adventures and misadventures as he navigates the rugged landscape and encounters a diverse cast of characters. Along the way, Achille grapples with questions of identity, belonging, and the elusive nature of trust. Diaz's prose is richly detailed and immersive, transporting readers to a vividly depicted world of frontier life and exploration. Through Achille's experiences, the novel explores themes of ambition, deception, and the pursuit of the American Dream. As Achille travels further into the wilderness, he must confront his own limitations and the harsh realities of the untamed frontier. With its lyrical language and evocative imagery, "Trust" is a masterfully crafted work of historical fiction that captures the spirit of the American West. Diaz's novel is a powerful meditation on the human condition and the timeless quest for meaning and connection. With its compelling narrative and unforgettable characters, "Trust" is a deserving recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, earning acclaim for its originality and literary prowess. Through Achille's odyssey, Diaz offers readers a profound exploration of the bonds that unite us and the forces that shape our lives.

[ordenyprogreso]

[snarfield]

Most of us prefer to believe we are the active subjects of our victories but only the passive objects of our defeats. We triumph, but it is not really we who fail - we are ruined by forces beyond our control.

Hernan Diaz, Trust

[thetypedwriter]

Trust Book Review

Trust by Hernan Diaz Book Review 

In keeping with tradition, I have once again read a book that I wouldn’t normally due to my boyfriend’s family’s annual Thanksgiving book club. Last year, we read The Personal Librarian by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray. I found it lacking in characterization and wanted to like it more than I did. 

This year’s book is Pulitzer Prize winner Trust by Hernan Diaz. Once again, I find myself inexplicably reading another book set in New York and revolving heavily around finances (a subject I could care less about).  

Trust starts off by telling the story of a high-brow New York couple. As characters, they are both terrible. The novel spends an inordinate amount of time with Helen’s backstory, describing her manipulative and attention-seeking mother and her crackpot father who continually regresses into his convoluted dogmas.

Helen eventually marries finance mogul Benjamin Rask whose apathy allows him to completely focus on finance and nothing else. 

As a couple, they come to an arrangement where Benjamin can focus on his Wall Street deals while Helen’s world revolves around music, the arts, and philanthropy.

This all starts to go downhill when Helen slowly starts losing her mind, eventually leading her to a Swiss sanatorium (the same one her father died in). Here she undergoes experimental electroshock therapy approved by her husband that leads to her painful and sudden death. 

As soon as you’re left gaping and finally hooked as a reader, Diaz switches the narrative on you completely and suddenly you find yourself reading a half-completed biography for someone named Andrew Bevel. The shift is confusing and unwelcome.

It took me over 100 pages to get invested in the Rasks and their life only for it to be whisked away. Additionally, Bevel’s biography is banal. Filled with copious amounts of history, name-dropping, and financial advice, I found myself drowning in boredom. 

Just when I thought I couldn’t take anymore, the narrative shifts once again, this time to the most interesting story. The memoir by Ida Partenza was the savior of this book for me. It clarified that the original story, the many chapters on the Rasks, was actually a “book” by author Harold Vanner on a real life couple named Andrew and Mildred Bevel.

Bevel, a living, breathing money mogul, is disgusted by Vanner’s fictionalized rendition of him and his wife and tasks young Ida Partenza to write his biography, the second section of the book by Diaz we had read previously. 

The memoir by Ida goes back in forth in time itself, with the young Ida interviewing, meeting Bevel, being chosen to write his biography, and leisurely coming to idolize him, all in contrast with future 70-year-old Ida who is looking back on her life, her choices, and the influence Bevel made on her while reading through Mildred’s files. 

I honestly wish the entire book had just been Ida’s memoir. It was by far the most interesting and most lucid part of the novel, tying everything else together and contrasting time periods within the narrative itself. 

Lastly, the fourth and final narrative switch comes in the form of Mildred Bevel’s diaries, depicting not the end of her life due to mental illness, but due to cancer.

Her diary entries range from abstract and philosophical to more poignant reflections on her life and her relationship with Andrew. 

It was a fascinating way to end the novel as a big question throughout the entire story—and the mystery plaguing Ida—is what truly happened to Mildred and who she really was as a person.

Trust turns out to be a meta-fictional story with shifting POV’s and unreliable narrators. While the beginning was a tedious slog, the ending with Ida and Mildred’s journals made this end positively for me.

I liked the puzzle of a story immersed in another story and I think reading a book about a couple and then reading about that couple is tricky to write and captivating to see unravel. 

A part of me understands that this complex meta-narrative is why Diaz won the Pulitzer Prize. However, another, larger part of me still thinks that even though the ending was twisty and clever, the beginning was so droll that it’s unbelievable to me that he won anything at all.

A strange observation I made while reading was how little dialogue there is in Diaz’s novel. You get close to none of it until Ida’s memoir (another reason it’s the best section), which is mind-blowing. 

Everyone knows that dialogue moves the story along, provides characterization, and is intriguing to read about. Having close to zero dialogue until nearly 300 pages in is ludicrous in my opinion.

The beginning pages of Trust are so incredibly difficult to get through (which I understand might be the point if the book was supposed to be bad), but the book was supposedly a bestseller in the meta universe of the day! 

It makes no sense to me unless that’s how novels were written in the 1920’s New York society circles (which also doesn’t seem to add up), so none of it makes it an appealing read to someone ingesting it in 2023. 

Additionally, as a writer myself I’ve been taught to try and capture your reader early on, to get them hooked on your story and your characters. Diaz did the opposite.

His beginning was so slow and his characters so mundane that it was an active turn-off for most of the experience until the very end. 

I applaud his ending, his enveloping storylines, and his untrustworthy narrators, but the 

beginning still haunted me all the way until the end. I fully admit that I’m biased towards YA and the things I enjoy, mainly good characters and interesting worlds, but excellent protagonists and charming settings don’t have (and shouldn’t be) the domain of YA alone.

It should be the goal of every good book, especially a Pulitzer Prize winner, to have all of the things that make Trust great in addition to characters I come to love, a world I can immerse myself in, and action that takes my breath away. 

Recommendation: Every time I read an adult novel, especially one chosen for something as prestigious as the Pulitzer Prize, it makes me realize why I appreciate young adult literature and how difficult it is to actually interweave action, dialogue, characterization, and plot while still maintaining the reader’s interest.

It’s an incredibly challenging thing to write and accomplish, something most YA writers learn to perfect. 

While Diaz’s novel might have won the Pulitzer Prize, and he crafted an interesting meta-story by the end with interlacing plot points and narratives, his lack of dialogue, trite characters, and chunks and chunks of dry writing made most of this book a chore to get through rather than an award-winning delight for me. 

Score: 6/10