Book Review by K.S.Loganathan
Hernan Diaz is a Argentinian-American writer of short stories, essays and non-fiction. ‘Trust’ is his second novel. It was longlisted for the Booker Prize ; it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2023. The book is a postmodern version of a historical novel which tells the story in four different ways .
There are four versions of the story – as a novel ,an incomplete celebrity memoir , an authorized biography, and notes from a diary- making up a fresh book-within -a book concept. It is about how wealth was made in 1920’s America by Andrew Bevel ,a Gatsby- like figure and his wife Mildred, a Zelda Fitzgerald- like figure. It is set in rumbustious New York City, sweeping across a century of change ,as the city looks forward and backward, mixing Old Money and New Money. The Wall Street Crash of 1929 is the centerpiece of the story .
Tension is added by the conflicts between husband and wife, capitalism and communism , employer and employee, the powerful and the weak. There is an unexpected twist in the end that runs counter to the preconceptions the reader may have built earlier.
Bevel is a wealthy man playing the part of a wealthy man. He is peeved at his thinly-veiled portrayal as Benjamin Rask in a family saga by a writer Harold Vanner in a novel titled ‘Bonds’ and he spares no effort to thwart the marketing of the book. He tasks his handpicked secretary Ida Partenza to vindicate his wife and also defend his own extraordinary business practices and his belief that business was a form of patriotism.
At another level, the book connects Mildred Bevel, Helen Rask, and Ida Partenza in oblique ways. Bevelisms though abound in this book. There are other nuggets from strangers ; ‘ There is a better world. But it’s more expensive!’ for example.
My Views
This book is the print version of the ‘Rashomon Effect’ of the noted Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurasawa (Rashomon,1950). As in the film ,there are four different interpretations of what happened. The truth is relative and memory is unreliable. The four versions overlap to some degree while deviating somewhat in detail. There are useful sidelights on the transliteration of foreign languages and on the making of biographies , musical notes and tones etc. It is not a light read- what can be told in 128 pages takes the author 402.
What is remarkable is that the author comes up with four different tones to present facts by four different people . However the author does not forewarn the reader in the text about the narrative shift and indicates it only through content division and chapter numbers . We do not get the connection between Benjamin Rask and Andrew Bevel until much later, for example. It’s the way information comes to us in real time of course, in random order , but in a book we are accustomed to the author just telling a story. This story doesn’t have a beginning, a middle and an end. If the reader finishes it , s/he will appreciate the Roshomon Effect.
