Is money a fiction? Trustthe 2e novel by Hernán Díaz, American novelist born in Buenos Aires in 1973, won him the prestigious 2023 Pulitzer Prize. A fascinating four-headed hydra that skillfully dismantles the myths of money, finance and self-narrative.
It all begins with a novel entitled “Bonds”, in which Harold Vanner, its author, recounts the life of Benjamin Rask, a wealthy American financier in the first half of the 20th century.e century fascinated by the “contortions of money”.
Then come his marriage to a young woman from an old aristocratic family, his wife’s philanthropic activities at the heart of New York society, their legendary discretion and all the mysteries that are attributed to them.
At the time of the crash of 1929, when Rask was recording phenomenal profits, many accused him of having orchestrated the financial debacle. “Behind the invisible hand, there was his. » He may even be responsible, too, for the death of his wife who died after experimental pharmaceutical treatments in a clinic in Zurich, Switzerland — to treat her schizophrenia.
The second part, soberly titled “ My life »is the draft of Andrew Bevel’s autobiography – which served as a model, we understand, for the character of Benjamin Rask.
The American billionaire takes all the credit. “My initiatives saved American industry and business. » Bevel, heir to Adam Smith and the Quakers of New England, does not shy away from any impudence: “Our prosperity is the proof of our good deeds. »
Then, in “A Memoir, Remembered”, the third part, Ida Partenza, a 70-year-old writer, self-taught daughter of an Italian anarchist in exile in Brooklyn, recounts how she was hired at 23 by Andrew Bevel at the end of the 1930s. To offer the public, as “cash”, his own version after the death of his wife, Helen, in a Swiss sanatorium, suffering from cancer, but “serene and lucid”.
Rather than a “shadow without substance”, Ida will discover in Helen an intelligent and sophisticated woman. In the wake of her own emancipation, she dismantles for herself the trompe l’oeil orchestrated by Bevel, his desire to “twist” reality to make it coincide with his own fiction.
The 4e part of Trust — whose title evokes both the notion of trust and of a company exercising overwhelming domination — is the diary kept by Mme Bevel in Switzerland, discovered by Ida many years later, where certain keys to the Bevel mystery appear.
Few writers are capable of composing a truly polyphonic score where each of the narrative voices remains distinct and credible. This is one of the successes of Hernán Díaz, who also imbues the journey of Ida Partenza with an essential feminist vein, just like the destiny of Mildred Bevel.
“Look at religion. Fiction, harmless? Look at the oppressed masses who put up with their fate because they accept the lies they are fed. The story itself is just a fiction — a fiction with an army. And reality? Reality is fiction with an unlimited budget. That’s what it is. »
And this is also what Trust, a brilliant, dizzying novel. And maybe not harmless either.