6/9/2023 0 Comments Trust hernan diaz summaryHis name is Andrew Bevel, a guy who becomes “a wealthy man by playing the part of a wealthy man”. In Trust, he has built a postmodern version of a historical novel around a character at the other end of the economic scale – a Gatsby-like tycoon in 1920s New York who dutifully hosts lavish parties at which he is rarely glimpsed. Diaz’s first novel, the Pulitzer prize finalist In the Distance, was about a penniless young Swedish immigrant meeting swindlers and fanatics in California. As with David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas or Richard Powers’s The Overstory, its structure relies on interconnected narratives which deepen and destabilise one another. Trust incorporates all three of these literary forms. Unless we trust that a banknote “represents concrete goods”, it is just a piece of printed paper, as open to distortion as a novel, or a memoir, or a diary. The value of any commodity comes from us buying into its wider narrative. His answer is “fiction” – specifically, the “fiction of money”. H ow is reality funded?” asks the wealthy tycoon at the centre of Hernan Diaz’s Booker-longlisted second novel.
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