Trust by Hernan Diaz

Trust by Hernan Diaz

10 hours, 21 minutes

Read by: Edoardo Ballerini, Jonathon Davis, Mozhan Marno, Orlagh Cassidy

Published May 2022 by Penguin Publishing Group

Publisher's Summary: 

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.

My Thoughts:

Here is my recommendation to you: read the summary; read reviews of this book; decide whether or not it interests you and, if it does, add it to your list of books to read. Then don't pick it up to read for several months, until you've forgotten that summary and those reviews and only pick it up because it's on your list so you know it interested you at that time. 

To be honest, it's what I do so much of the time and it almost always works in my favor. It worked for me here. I had no idea when the book began that I was reading a book within a book. I was fascinated by Benjamin and Helen and their relationship. And then utterly startled when suddenly I was reading (well, listening to) notes written by Andrew Bevel, the man upon whom Benjamin Rask was based by the writer Harold Vanner in his book. 

Next we jump to Ida Partenza, a woman living with her out there father who had to run from Italy because of his political beliefs, who is hired by Bevel to write that memoir we just read the notes for. Ida's task is made all the more difficult by Bevel's insistence on clearing his wife's name while also refusing to include any real details of her life, much to Partenza's amazement. Neither book will yield a true picture of the real Mildred Bevel, a woman Andrew didn't seem to know well himself. Ida grows more and more curious and, ultimately, finds Mildred's diaries. And that's where readers go next, into the pages of those diaries to get to know the real Mildred Bevel. At least that's what we believe. In the end, though, we're trusting her to know that truth. But at this point, one wonders if the truth is still out there to be found. 

This book won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and it's easy to see why. This is such an interesting and unique way to tell a story. Even more an interesting and unique way to remind readers that the truth is not easy to know. And within that unique structure is so much more. In Trust, Diaz has written: 

"...a glorious novel about empires and erasures, husbands and wives, staggering fortunes and unspeakable misery..." - Oprah Daily

"A remarkably accessible treatise on the power of fiction." - The Boston Globe

"A rip-roaring, razor-sharp dissection of capitalism, class, greed, and the meaning of money itself." - Vogue

If you're looking for a book that will challenge you, make you think, teach you something (lordy, did I learn a lot about the stock market, in particular in the early decades of the last century), that's exceedingly well written, I highly recommend Trust. Is it a book I loved? Not really. But it is one I greatly admire.