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WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION

ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES’S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21ST CENTURY

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2022
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2022 BOOKER PRIZE

“Buzzy and enthralling . . . A glorious novel about empires and erasures, husbands and wives, staggering fortunes and unspeakable misery . . . Fun as hell to read.” —Oprah Daily

"A genre-bending, time-skipping story about New York City’s elite in the roaring ’20s and Great Depression." —Vanity Fair

“A riveting story of class, capitalism, and greed.” —Esquire

"Exhilarating.” —New York Times

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.

Review

Praise for Trust:

“Intricate, cunning and consistently surprising…Much of the novel's pleasure derives from its unpredictabiility...Add Henry James to Wharton, and Thomas Mann too...Exhilarating and intelligent novel.” —New York Times

“Luminous… Masterful… The drama lies in trying to puzzle out where Diaz will take you next, what’s been hidden, and why.”—The New Yorker

“A rip-roaring, razor-sharp dissection of capitalism, class, greed, and the meaning of money itself that also manages to be a dazzling feat of storytelling on its own terms… Important and timely. But the uniquely brilliant way in which Diaz tells that story, as meticulously researched as it is narratively exhilarating, makes it a novel not just for the present age but for the ages.”—Vogue

“[A] riveting story of class, capitalism, and greed. The result is a mesmerizing metafictional alchemy of grand scope and even grander accomplishment.”—Esquire

“There is a dazzling intelligence behind this novel, which challenges us to rethink everything we know both about the institutions on which nations are built and the narratives by which stories are told. Sly, sophisticated, insistently questioning, Diaz writes with assurance, determined to rob us of every certainty.”—the Booker Prizes

"Literary fiction…is a fantastic commodity in which our best writers become criminals of the imagination, stealing our attention and our very desires. Diaz makes an artistic fortune in Trust. And we readers make out like bandits, too.”—Maureen Corrigan, NPR

“A buzzy and enthralling tour de force… a glorious novel about empires and erasures, husbands and wives, staggering fortunes and unspeakable misery…Mostly, though, Trust is a literary page-turner, with a wealth of puns and elegant prose, fun as hell to read.”—Oprah Daily

“A remarkably accessible treatise on the power of fiction. This unquestionably smart and sophisticated novel not only mirrors truth, but helps us to better understand it.”—The Boston Globe

"Ingenious...challenges conventional story lines of another favorite American theme: capitalism and the accumulation of vast wealth…Diaz employs his inventive structure to offer intriguing insights into the hidden roles played by subservient women." —Minneapolis Star Tribune

"The world of Trust feels very close to our own...This book is a reminder that wealth isn’t a treasure chest and the rich aren’t magical, no matter how dramatically they shape the world. It’s all just money, made by real people, with very real, often dangerous implications." —Vanity Fair

“Rich and prismatic…” —Wall Street Journal

“The only certainty here is Diaz’s brilliance and the value of his rewarding book…In execution it’s an elegant, irresistible puzzle.”—The Washington Post

“Wondrous… Diaz is brilliant at dissecting literary conventions and transforming them into something new.” —The New York Review of Books

“Through perfectly formed sentences and the skilful unpicking of certainties, Trust creates a great portrait of New York across an entire century of change . . . a work possessed of real power and purpose . . . It’s a testament to Diaz’s cunning abilities as a writer that you end his book thinking that— if truth is your goal —you might be better off relying on a novelist than a banker.”—Jonathan Lee, The Guardian (UK)

“Sharp and affecting . . . Diaz’s great subject is the scale of American mythmaking . . . It is in his ugly-beautiful portrait of great wealth that Diaz shows his brilliance . . . In this literary Rubik’s Cube, Diaz provides a viable, and hugely entertaining, argument that once a pen is put to paper an element of veracity is always lost. And when money is thrown into the mix, then the lies really multiply.”—Financial Times (UK)

“An absolutely brilliant novel… A wily jackalope of a novel — tame but prickly, a different beast from every angle…The setup is so shrewd and the writing so immaculate." —Los Angeles Times

“Hernan Diaz, one of the least derivative, most eccentrically ambitious fiction writers I’ve read in a long while.” —Jonathan Dee in Harper’s Magazine

“Trust proves that Diaz is a writer of singular talent. This book is a kaleidoscopic dazzler that works as both an engrossing literary mystery and a capitalistic takedown for the ages. Don’t miss it.”—Chicago Review of Books

"A multifaceted saga of class, wealth, and mythmaking that should resonate with today’s capitalism-questioning readers.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer

“A uniquely layered novel…Each page peels back another mystery, making for an utterly riveting read.” —Buzzfeed

“Like a tower of gifts waiting to be unwrapped, Trust offers a multitude of rewards to be discovered and enjoyed … [a] beautifully composed masterpiece."—BookPage, STARRED review

“For all its elegant complexity and brilliant construction, Diaz's novel is compulsively readable, and despite taking place in the early 1900s, the plot reads like an indictment of the start of the twenty-first century with its obsession with obscure financial instruments and unhinged capital accumulation. A captivating tour de force that will astound readers with its formal invention and contemporary relevance."—Booklist, STARRED review

“[A] kaleidoscope of capitalism run amok in the early 20th century . . . Grounded in history and formally ambitious, this succeeds on all fronts. Once again, Diaz makes the most of his formidable gifts.”—Publishers Weekly, STARRED Review

“A feat of literary gamesmanship [that] brilliantly weaves its multiple perspectives to create a symphony of emotional effects . . . [T]he collection of palimpsests makes for a thrilling experience ...A clever and affecting high-concept novel of high finance.”—Kirkus, STARRED review

“Hernan Diaz is a narrative genius whose work easily encompasses both a grand scope and the crisp and whiplike line. Trust builds its world and characters with subtle aplomb. What a radiant, profound and moving novel.”—Lauren Groff, New York Times bestselling author of Matrix

“Diaz understands, and deeply, how strange money is, as an omnipotent and imaginary substance that controls our lives. Trust glints with wonder and knowledge and mystery. Its plotlines are as etched and surreal as Art Deco geometry, while inside that architecture are people who feel appallingly real. This novel is very classical and very original: Balzac would be proud, but so would Borges.”—Rachel Kushner, New York Times bestselling author of The Mars Room

“That rare jewel of a book—jaw-dropping storytelling against the backdrop of beautiful writing. Amidst all the noise in the world, whole days found me curled up on the couch, lost inside Diaz’s brilliance.”—Jacqueline Woodson, National Book Award-winning author of Red at the Bone

“Though set in a historical New York, Trust speaks to matters of the most urgent significance to the present day. Money, power, class, marital and filial relations, the roles played by trust and betrayal in human affairs—Diaz’s development of his chosen themes is deeply insightful. Cleverly constructed and rich in surprises, this splendid novel offers serious ideas and serious pleasures on every beautifully composed page.” —Sigrid Nunez, National Book Award–winning author of The Friend

“Sublime, richly layered novel. A story within a story within a story. Elegantly written.”—Roxane Gay, bestselling author of Difficult Women

“The audacity and scope of Hernan Diaz’s extraordinary novel—a prism, a mystery, a revelation—are brilliantly matched by the quality of his prose.”—Jean Strouse, author of Morgan: American Financier

"What a joy this is to read, suspenseful at every turn, the work of a rare and impressive talent. Diaz has once again taken apart an American myth and pondered how we lie to ourselves.”—Joan Silber, National Book Critics Circle Award–winning author of Improvement

About the Author

Hernan Diaz is the Pulitzer Prize-winning and New York Times bestselling author of Trust. Translated into more than thirty languages, Trust also received the Kirkus Prize, was longlisted for the Booker Prize, and was named one of the 10 Best Books of the Year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, and Time magazine, and it was one of The New Yorker’s 12 Essential Reads of the Year and one of Barack Obama’s favorite books of the year. Trust is currently being developed as a limited series for HBO. Diaz’s previous novel, In the Distance, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and it won the William Saroyan International Prize. His work has appeared in The Paris Review, Granta, The Atlantic, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere. He has received the John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and a fellowship from the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

ONE

Because he had enjoyed almost every advantage since birth, one of the few privileges denied to Benjamin Rask was that of a heroic rise: his was not a story of resilience and perseverance or the tale of an unbreakable will forging a golden destiny for itself out of little more than dross. According to the back of the Rask family Bible, in 1662 his father's ancestors had migrated from Copenhagen to Glasgow, where they started trading in tobacco from the Colonies. Over the next century, their business prospered and expanded to the extent that part of the family moved to America so they could better oversee their suppliers and control every aspect of production. Three generations later, Benjamin's father, Solomon, bought out all his relatives and outside investors. Under his sole direction, the company kept flourishing, and it did not take him long to become one of the most prominent tobacco traders on the Eastern Seaboard. It may have been true that his inventory was sourced from the finest providers on the continent, but more than in the quality of his merchandise, the key to Solomon's success lay in his ability to exploit an obvious fact: there was, of course, an epicurean side to tobacco, but most men smoked so that they could talk to other men. Solomon Rask was, therefore, a purveyor not only of the finest cigars, cigarillos, and pipe blends but also (and mostly) of excellent conversation and political connections. He rose to the pinnacle of his business and secured his place there thanks to his gregariousness and the friendships cultivated in the smoking room, where he was often seen sharing one of his figurados with some of his most distinguished customers, among whom he counted Grover Cleveland, William Zachary Irving, and John Pierpont Morgan.

At the height of his success, Solomon had a townhouse built on West 17th Street, which was finished just in time for Benjamin's birth. Yet Solomon was seldom to be seen at the New York family residence. His work took him from one plantation to another, and he was always supervising rolling rooms or visiting business associates in Virginia, North Carolina, and the Caribbean. He even owned a small hacienda in Cuba, where he passed the greater part of each winter. Rumors concerning his life on the island established his reputation as an adventurer with a taste for the exotic, which was an asset in his line of business.

Mrs. Wilhelmina Rask never set foot on her husband's Cuban estate. She, too, was absent from New York for long stretches, leaving as soon as Solomon returned and staying at her friends' summerhouses on the east bank of the Hudson or their cottages in Newport for entire seasons. The only visible thing she shared with Solomon was a passion for cigars, which she smoked compulsively. This being a very uncommon source of pleasure for a lady, she would only indulge in private, in the company of her girl-friends. But this was no impediment, since she was surrounded by them at all times. Willie, as those in her set called her, was part of a tightly knit group of women who seemed to constitute a sort of nomadic tribe. They were not only from New York but also from Washington, Philadelphia, Providence, Boston, and even as far as Chicago. They moved as a pack, visiting one another's houses and vacation homes according to the seasons-West 17th Street became the coterie's abode for a few months, starting in late September, when Solomon left for his hacienda. Still, no matter in what part of the country the ladies happened to dwell, the clique invariably kept to itself in an impenetrable circle.

Limited, for the most part, to his and his nursemaids' rooms, Benjamin had only a vague notion of the rest of the brownstone where he grew up. When his mother and her friends were there, he was kept away from the rooms where they smoked, played cards, and drank Sauternes well into the night; when they were gone, the main floors became a dim succession of shuttered windows, covered furniture, and chandeliers in ballooning shrouds. All of his nurses and governesses said he was a model child, and all of his tutors confirmed it. Manners, intelligence, and obedience had never been combined as harmoniously as in this sweet-tempered child. The only fault some of his caregivers could find after much searching was Benjamin's reluctance to associate with other children. When one of his tutors attributed his student's friendlessness to fear, Solomon waved his concerns away, saying the boy was just becoming a man of his own.

His lonely upbringing did not prepare him for boarding school. During the first term, he became the object of daily indignities and small cruelties. In time, however, his classmates discovered that his impassiveness made him a dissatisfying victim and left him alone. He kept to himself and excelled, dispassionately, in every subject. At the end of each year, after bestowing on him all available honors and distinctions, his teachers, without fail, would remind him that he was meant to bring much glory to the Academy.

During his senior year, his father died of heart failure. At the service, back in New York, relatives and acquaintances alike were impressed by Benjamin's composure, but the truth was that mourning simply had given the natural dispositions of his character a socially recognizable form. In a display of great precocity that baffled his father's attorneys and bankers, the boy requested to examine the will and all the financial statements related to it. Mr. Rask was a conscientious, tidy man, and his son found no fault with the documents. Having concluded this business and knowing what to expect once he came of age and into possession of his inheritance, he returned to New Hampshire to finish school.

His mother spent her brief widowhood with her friends in Rhode Island. She went in May, shortly before Benjamin's graduation, and by the end of the summer had died from emphysema. The family and friends who attended this second, much more subdued memorial barely knew how to speak to the young man orphaned in the course of a mere few months. Thankfully, there were many practical issues to discuss-trusts, executors, and the legal challenges in settling the estate.
Benjamin's experience as a college student was an amplified echo of his years as a schoolboy. All the same inadequacies and talents were there, but now he seemed to have acquired a cold sort of fondness for the former and a humble disdain for the latter. Some of the more salient traits of his lineage appeared to have come to an end with him. He could not have been more different from his father, who had owned every room he had walked into and made everyone in it gravitate around him, and he had nothing in common with his mother, who had probably never spent a day of her life alone. These discrepancies with his parents became even more accentuated after his graduation. He moved back from New England to the city and failed where most of his acquaintances thrived-he was an inept athlete, an apathetic clubman, an unenthusiastic drinker, an indifferent gambler, a lukewarm lover. He, who owed his fortune to tobacco, did not even smoke. Those who accused him of being excessively frugal failed to understand that, in truth, he had no appetites to repress.

The tobacco business could not have interested Benjamin less. He disliked both the product-the primitive sucking and puffing, the savage fascination with smoke, the bittersweet stench of rotten leaves-and the congeniality around it, which his father had enjoyed so much and exploited so well. Nothing disgusted him more than the misty complicities of the smoking room. Despite his most honest efforts, he could not argue, with any semblance of passion, for the virtue of a lonsdale over a diadema, and he was unable to sing, with the vigor that only firsthand knowledge can impart, the praise of the robustos from his Vuelta Abajo estate. Plantations, curing barns, and cigar factories belonged to a remote world he had no interest in getting to know. He would have been the first to admit he was an appalling ambassador for the company and therefore delegated daily operations to the manager who had served under his father for two faithful decades. It was against the advice of this manager that Benjamin, through agents he never met in person, undersold his father's Cuban hacienda and everything in it, without even taking an inventory. His banker invested the money in the stock market, together with the rest of his savings.
A few stagnant years went by, during which he made halfhearted attempts at starting different collections (coins, china, friends), dabbled in hypochondria, tried to develop an enthusiasm for horses, and failed to become a dandy.

Time became a constant itch.

Against his true inclinations, he started planning a trip to Europe. All that interested him about the Old Continent he had already learned through books; experiencing those things and places was of no importance to him. And he did not look forward to being confined on a ship with strangers for days on end. Still, he told himself that if he ever would leave, this would be the proper moment: the general atmosphere in New York City was rather glum as the result of a series of financial crises and the ensuing economic recession that had engulfed the country for the last two years. Because the downturn did not affect him directly, Benjamin was only vaguely aware of its causes-it had all started, he believed, with the burst of the railroad bubble, somehow linked to a subsequent silver crash, leading, in turn, to a run on gold, which, in the end, resulted in numerous bank failures in what came to be known as the panic of 1893. Whatever the actual chain of events might have been, he was not worried. He had a general notion that markets swung back and forth and was confident that today's losses would be tomorrow's gains. Rather than discouraging his European excursion, the financial crisis-the worst since the Long Depression, two decades earlier-was among the strongest encouragements he found to leave.

As he was about to set a date for his journey, his banker informed him that, through some of his "connections," he had been able to subscribe to bonds issued to restore the nation's gold reserves, whose depletion had driven so many banks to insolvency. The entire issue had sold out in a mere half hour, and he had turned a handsome profit within the week. Thus, unsolicited luck, in the form of favorable political shifts and market fluctuations, led to the sudden and seemingly spontaneous growth of Benjamin's respectable inheritance, which he had never cared to enlarge. But once chance had done it for him, he discovered a hunger at his core he did not know existed until it was given a bait big enough to stir it to life. Europe would have to wait.

Rask's assets were in the conservative care of J. S. Winslow & Co., the house that had always managed the family's business. The firm, founded by one of his father's friends, was now in the hands of John S. Winslow Jr., who had tried and failed to befriend Benjamin. As a result of this, the relationship between the two young men was somewhat uneasy. Still, they worked together closely-even if it was through messengers or over the telephone, either of which Benjamin preferred to redundant and laboriously genial face-to-face meetings.

Soon, Benjamin became adept at reading the ticker tape, finding patterns, intersecting them, and discovering hidden causal links between apparently disconnected tendencies. Winslow, realizing his client was a gifted learner, made things look more arcane than they truly were and dismissed his predictions. Even so, Rask started making his own decisions, usually against the firm's counsel. He was drawn to short-term investments and instructed Winslow to make high-risk trades in options, futures, and other speculative instruments. Winslow would always urge caution and protest against these reckless schemes: he refused to put Benjamin in a position to lose his capital in hazardous ventures. But more than worried about his client's assets, Winslow seemed to be concerned about appearances and eager to display a certain financial decorum-after all, as he once said, laughing shallowly at his own wit, he was, if anything, a bookkeeper, not a bookmaker, in charge of a finance house, not a gambling house. From his father, he had inherited a reputation for pursuing sound investments, and he intended to honor this legacy. Still, in the end, he always followed Rask's directives and kept his commissions.

Within a year, tired of his advisor's priggishness and ponderous pace, Rask decided to start trading on his own account and dismissed Winslow. Severing all ties with the family that had been so close to his for two generations was an added satisfaction to the feeling of true achievement Rask experienced, for the first time in his life, when he took the reins of his affairs.

The two lower floors of his brownstone became a makeshift office. This transformation was not the result of a plan but, rather, the effect of meeting unforeseen needs one by one, as they came, until, unexpectedly, there was something like a workspace filled with employees. It started with a messenger, whom Benjamin had running all over town with stock certificates, bonds, and other documents. A few days later, the boy let him know he had to have help. Together with an additional messenger, Benjamin got a telephone girl and a clerk, who soon informed him he was unable to cope on his own. Managing his people was taking vital time away from Benjamin's business, so he hired an assistant. And keeping books simply became too time-consuming, so he engaged an accountant. By the time his assistant got an assistant, Rask stopped keeping track of the new hires and no longer bothered to remember anyone's face or name.

The furniture that had remained untouched and under covers for years was now handled irreverently by secretaries and errand boys. A stock ticker had been installed on the walnut serving table; quote boards covered most of the gilt-embossed foliage wallpaper; piles of newspapers had stained the straw-yellow velvet of a settee; a typewriter had dented a satinwood bureau; black and red ink blotched the needlework upholstery of divans and sofas; cigarettes had burned the serpentine edges of a mahogany desk; hurried shoes had scuffed oak claw feet and soiled, forever, Persian runners. His parents' rooms were left intact. He slept on the top floor, which he had never even visited as a child.

It was not hard to find a buyer for his father's business. Benjamin encouraged a manufacturer from Virginia and a trading company from the United Kingdom to outbid each other. Wishing to distance himself from that part of his past, he was pleased to see the British prevail, thus sending the tobacco company whence it had come. But what truly gratified him was that with the profits from this sale he was able to work on a higher plane, manage a new level of risk, and finance long-term transactions he had been unable to consider in the past. Those around him were confused to see his possessions decrease in direct proportion to his wealth. He sold all remaining family properties, including the brownstone on West 17th Street, and everything in them. His clothes and papers fit into two trunks, which were sent to the Wagstaff Hotel, where he took a suite of rooms.

He became fascinated by the contortions of money—how it could be made to bend back upon itself to be force-fed its own body. The isolated, self-sufficient nature of speculation spoke to his character and was a source of wonder and an end in itself, regardless of what the increasing numbers represented or afforded him. Luxury was a vulgar burden. The access to new experiences was not something his sequestered spirit craved. Politics and the pursuit of power played no part in his unsocial mind. Games of strategy, like chess or bridge, had never interested him. If asked, Benjamin would probably have found it hard to explain what drew him to the world of finance. It was the complexity of it, yes, but also the fact that he viewed capital as an antiseptically living thing. It moves, eats, grows, breeds, falls ill, and may die. But it is clean. This became clearer to him in time. The larger the operation, the further removed he was from its concrete details. There was no need for him to touch a single banknote or engage with the things and people his transaction affected. All he had to do was think, speak, and, perhaps, write. And the living creature would be set in motion, drawing beautiful patterns on its way into realms of increasing abstraction, sometimes following appetites of its own that Benjamin never could have anticipated—and this gave him some additional pleasure, the creature trying to exercise its free will. He admired it and understood it, even when it disappointed him.

Review:

4.6 out of 5

92.50% of customers are satisfied

5.0 out of 5 stars Storytelling On Wall Street

r.f. · December 27, 2023

Herman Diaz's 2023 Pulitzer Prize winning novel "Trust" absorbed me from beginning to end. For several days, I was captivated -- couldn't wait to get to it. This is a rarity for me. "Trust" is largely set in the financial district of New York City in the years surrounding the Great Depression.Here is a bare-bones summary of the story. The main character is a financier and trader, Andrew Bevel, the latest, and last, of a line of traders in his family. The reclusive Bevel amasses a large fortune during the 1920s and also manages to make money during the early stages of the Depression. Bevel's wife, Mildred, is the daughter of another New York State family with wealth and with intellectual interests. While Bevel concentrates on making his fortune, Mildred promotes educational, artistic, and cultural endeavors, particularly the development of 20th Century classical music. When Mildred dies in a Swiss sanatorium, in the 1930s, Bevel carries on but is somewhat less successful than in the days with his wife. After Bevel's death and lengthy wrangling over his estate, his palatial New York City home is turned into a museum.As is pointed out through "Trust", American literature has many works about New York City, the wealthy classes, the financial markets, and the nature of capitalism. This novel brings to it subject a strong sense of perspectivism. Bevel's story is told in four voices by four individuals, each with their own distinct voice and background. Each story has commonalities, but each is also different in terms of what happened and in terms of human relationships. The reader is left to think through the stories to come to an understanding of events and people. Showing and considering different points of view is integral to the humanities, whether history, literature, or philosophy, and to this novel. "Trust" considers city life, capitalism and greed, the arts, marriage, the relationship between imagination and realism, and more within its complex structure. It is challenging and mostly effective.Each of the four storytellers are fascinating both as writers and as themselves. The first, Harold Vanner, was a minor novelist of the day who wrote a heavily fictionalized novella about the Bevels titled "Bonds". It was fascinating to get hints about Vanner through the book and to read his account. The second part, "My Life" was written by Andrew Bevel himself, with help, and tells his story from his perspective and to rebut Vanner's book.The third and longest story is "A Memoir, Remembered" by Ida Partenza. She tells her tale from the standpoint of a 70 year old successful author. Partenza had been raised in poverty in Brooklyn by her father, an anarchist. At the age of 23, Bevel had hired her to help write his Autobiography. Partenza discusses her life with her father, how she came to be hired by Bevel, and how she became fascinated by the writing project and shaped it to her own as well as to Bevel's ends. The final section of the book, "Futures" consists of diary entries by Midred during her time in the Swiss sanatorium just before her death. Midred has a different perspective on the story and on her relationship with Bevel than do the other three storytellers.The reader will be encouraged to think about the world of financial trusts and about whom to trust among the four narrators, with their differing aims and perspectives. In his "Phaedrus", Plato has Socrates say that the written word can be revealing but also narrowing in its fixity.With the many earlier literary antecedents to Diaz's novel, I was reminded most of "Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer" by Steven Millhauser which won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Martin Dressler is an American entrepreneur who, unlike Bevel was born to modest means. Dressler reaches the American dream of riches in New York City by founding a series of hotels before his businesses and his personal life come crashing down on his head. The story is a mix of realism and surrealism which captured something of the themes and locations of "Trust" in its own way. Unfortunately "Martin Dressler" has fallen into neglect. It deserves to be read both in it own right and as another voice on the themes of "Trust"."Trust" is a challenging, provocative novel about an aspect of the American dream and the American experience.Robin Friedman

4.0 out of 5 stars Complexity of trust

J.C. · July 17, 2024

This is an engaging deep dive into the multi-perspective nature of life. It could read as an DNA/AI rendering of a single person's face, tracing back several hundred years to portray the latest version of an individual's cellular make-up. It is not easy to read nor easy to put down; a well written treatise on the arc of history.

3.0 out of 5 stars Competent writing with a modest, predictable take on a now-common literary conceit

P. · September 16, 2024

It will come as no surprise to anyone who has gotten to my review that this book consists of the story of a financially powerful couple told from four perspectives. If you didn't know that, you would figure it out a few pages into the second version of the story. If you're particularly surprised by the fourth and final story, then you should reread the title of the book, which might be retitled "Always Mistrust." Mr. Diaz is a good enough writer that I don't begrudge myself the time spent reading the book, but I found nothing lyrical or passionately revealing or inspiring or innovative in his style. He's an okay storyteller, with characters I guess you can try earnestly to care about enough to deeply engage. Ultimately, I didn't come close to succeeding in that. The fourth version of the story is--by my estimation--the one that is supposed to produce the OMG-response, but I already knew something was coming and that it was going to reshape my view of the central characters and of everything I read before. To miss that going into that last section would be to ignore the previous three versions of the tale. And then, early in that final "diary" section, when we learn of previously trivialized mathematical skills and are given more to chew on about things like musical appreciation with a little Music 101 philosophizing (D F# E A -> A E F# D), it's pretty easy to guess what's coming. That's okay (except to the extent that the diarist sneers at predictability as a mark of lesser minds).It's the way the great reveal happens that bothers me and makes me feel that this is a failed novel. In a diary that is terse, minimalist, merely suggestive, the diarist stops in a couple places to ham-handedly tell OMG counterstory (the one, I assume, most readers decide upon closing the book for the last time to TRUST, given its location in the text and the satisfaction that the final gotcha-putdown of an unsympathetic protagonist provides).The diarist claims that the jarringly different passages that explain exactly what what REALLY happened (in careful expository detail) gives her some relief from pain and discomfort, but it came across to me as a plot device that the author failed to pull off. If you're going to just explain the OMG to me this way, then I'd prefer you stick it in a final explanatory section (Section V: Guess What!) written by an all-knowing author-god-voice. Don't give me: "AM Ouch my back hurts PM Morph AM Powerpoint slide #1: my actual talents, part 1...(a)...slide #2: my pitiful spouse's inadequacies...(a)..."One thing that diary section succeeded in doing was to swap out my feelings about the two central characters. The one who had seemed cold and insensitive gained a sliver of humanity and a quarter teaspoon of sympathy from me. The diarist, who rejoiced in bragging about personal superiority and absolute condescension toward a befuddled, largely incompetent other, lost any positive regard (already at very low simmer) that I had developed in the previous three versions of the story.Maybe that's the point. Don't trust anything you have just spent an entire book reading, including the final section. But if that's the take-away, why should wish to learn more about these people I was misled about? Surely, a good story should leave you with some appetite for more...for something truthier and give-a-damn-ier. These are people I never really cared about. Rather than becoming multidimensional by the retelling of the story, they were one-dimensional four times over. I don't like them (any of them, except maybe the champagne-toting butler: "Two glasses? Very good, sir."). I don't trust them. I feel no regret that they have disappeared into the dustbin of fictional time.

Excellent!!!

D.R.T. · October 7, 2023

Interesting and amazing at the same time.I decided to read the english version and the prose was superb.Once you finish reading, it is obvious why Hernan Diaz won the Pulitzer Price!

Plaisir de lecture

N.L. · September 19, 2023

Plusieurs ont émis l’opinion que l’auteur a écrit ce livre en s’inspirant largement de Balzac, avec ses longues descriptions, et de Borges, un maître pour lui, alors dans cette veine là j’ajouterais que les derniers chapitres me font penser à ‘Fifty shades of grey’ de E.L. James.L’auteur a beaucoup lu, on ne peut que le constater, et j’ai même reconnu, dans le décor, la clinique psychiatrique de Jung en Suisse, bien décrite dans une biographie du grand psychanalyste Carl Jung.Ce qui m’a fait apprécier cette lecture c’est le ton agréablement humoristique, sans dérision, sur le milieu des affaires mais aussi sur la société américaine, ainsi que l’écriture au très riche vocabulaire. Si je crois qu’il s’amuse un peu en parlant des affaires en bourse, ses personnages sont tout à fait crédibles et illustrent très bien la ‘comédie humaine’ dont ils font partie, dans une version moderne et originale.Un commentaire sur une couverture du livre me semble très appropriée :’ (…)Diaz a de nouveau isolé un mythe Américain et nous fait réfléchir à quel point on se ment à nous-mêmes’, écrit Joan Silber du National Book Critics Circle.

Vier in eins

S.F. · September 20, 2024

Ein tolles Buch, dessen Wirkung sich erst am Ende voll entfaltet, denn die vier verschieden Perspektiven lassen jeweils andere Aspekte der zwei Hauptgestalten erscheinen, weshalb ein sehr komplexes Bild entsteht. Wer alle Puzzleteile am Ende zusammensetzt, wird überrascht sein. Unbedingt zu empfehlen! Ein Leserlebnis!

Audacious

p.c. · July 30, 2024

The various parts of this book are written in different styles. The authorial voice changes completely—an incredibly skilful piece of work.

Consider the influence of the written word on those who read it

J.U. · June 25, 2024

I was attracted to this book by the promise of an intriguing story told in an unusual structure. We are told that there are "competing" versions of events which will challenge the concept of an unreliable narrator. At least three of these accounts will be untrue or maybe even all of them.The book was first published in 2022. It has 402 pages split into 4 parts - each with a separate chapters structure that promises complexity.At first glance the book seems to be 4 novellas linked together but it is so much more than that.I adored the style of writing from the first page. The vocabulary is wide ranging and the sentences are often lyrical - I found myself often slowing down to read in order to savour the writing.The descriptions are gorgeous and I loved that the author took time to explore contrasts in all areas - nature and emotions are two obvious examples.Benjamin Rask is the main subject for the first part - I was completely invested in him and was enjoying his journey so felt quite disturbed when his story came to an abrupt end and the author moved onto the second part.Several times I thought I was starting to understand the connections/structure/message but the author was just playing with me and there are plenty of complications added to catch me off guard. The changes of style and narrator were expected but the changes in structure were a surprise.I have a huge admiration for the planning of this novel and I found myself with no other option than to keep engaged.After reading Andrew's account I knew there was more to come but, again, was caught by surprise with the way that the plot turned.The title is Trust but I think the novel is more about money and the fictional concepts created within the world of finance.Herman Diaz explores how true stories can be fictionalised and the impact that then has on the real people. Of course, here the "novel" inside is based on the author's own fictional creation - this adds extra layers and allows for a deep analysis

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Trust (Pulitzer Prize Winner)

Name: Trust (Pulitzer Prize Winner)
Brand: Riverhead Books
SKU: U0593420322
Price: 6.67 BHD
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Rating: 4.1 (8 reviews)

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