Quizlit’s Book of the Month for April 2023 is Trust by Hernan Diaz. Just announced the winner of the Fiction Pulitzer Prize 2023
Book of the Month April 2023
Trust is Hernan Diaz’s second novel. It is a collection of four manuscripts at different stages of completion, and they tell different versions of the story of a Wall Street businessman and his wife in the years leading up to the Great Depression.
In the first part, Bonds, ostensibly a bestselling novel authored by one Harold Vanner, a monkish mogul manages to make a massive windfall during the 1929 stock market crash while his wife tragically succumbs to mental illness far away in Switzerland. My Life is the partial autobiography of Andrew Bevel, clearly the model for the tycoon in Bonds, strewn with half-finished chapters and paragraph outlines. The first few pages of Futures, the scribbled diaries of Andrew’s wife, Mildred, have been randomly ripped out. The Bevels’ competing narratives are mediated by a long postmortem memoir, written by Ida Partenza, once the gullible ghostwriter of Andrew’s book.
In summary Trust is an elegant, irresistible puzzle. The novel isn’t just about the way history and biography are written; it’s a demonstration of that process. An unparalleled book about money, power, intimacy, and perception
About the Author
Hernan Diaz is the author of two novels translated into more than twenty languages. His first novel, In the Distance, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. He has also written a book of essays, and his work has appeared in The Paris Review, Granta, Playboy, The Yale Review, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing, and a fellowship from the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.
Born 1973 in Argentina, he grew up in Sweden but has lived most of his life in the US. He is the associate director of the Hispanic Institute for Latin American and Iberian Cultures at Columbia University in New York.
Check out our selection for Book of the Month June 2023
