Trust (Pulitzer Prize Winner)

4.1 4.1 out of 5 stars | 30,434 ratings

Price: 2.99

Last update: 08-30-2024


About this item

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.

From the Publisher

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. TRUST By Hernan Diaz
"What a radiant, profound and moving novel" -Lauren Groff
"Trust glints with wonder and knowledge and mystery" -Rachel Kushner
"Trust speaks to matters of the most urgent significance to the present day." -Sigrid Nunez
Named A Most Anticipated Book of 2022 By Goodreads, Oprah Daily, AV Club, Vulture, Literary Hub

Top reviews from the United States

Michael Walter
5.0 out of 5 stars Wow! What an Incredible Book
Reviewed in the United States on February 21, 2024
Wow. What an incredible book. What a unique approach to telling a story. What a ride!

I’m not going to lie. I was confused till about the halfway point of this book. Once I figured out what was going on the story really took off and I was so glad I’d hung in there with it.

Trust begins with a biography of a brilliant financier named Benjamin Rask who somehow foresees the stock market crash of 1929, and not only protects his fortune (while all around him are losing theirs) but actually benefits from the crash by short selling at the exactly perfect moment. Soon after this, his wife Helen becomes ill and dies a horrible death.

Then 100 odd pages into this 400 page book that story ends and an autobiography begins. Andrew Bevel is the author of this piece and his life story is vaguely similar to Rask’s with a few notable differences, specifically that his wife Mildred, while also passing away too young, is spared the horrific death that Helen endured.

When this autobiography ends, we finally get an explanation. The Rask story was written as a fictional account but was close enough to Bevel’s life story to make most people believe it’s about him. Bevel now sets out to retell his story while erasing the fictional one (by buying the publishing house that printed the original book and squashing its future publication). All of this we discover through the words of Ida Portenza, a writer that Bevel hires to help him craft his story. Through Portenza’s investigation, we discover that Bevel was not the prescient investor. It was his wife.

Or maybe that was just her retelling of the story because Portenza learns this when she finds Mildred’s journals long after she is gone.

And that’s the beauty of Trust. By the end, the reader doesn’t know who to trust.

We each tell our own stories, don’t we? And it’s human nature to make ourselves more important, more heroic, in those tales. Where does the truth lie? Whose account can you trust?

Diaz’ writing is exquisite and he saves his finest prose for the end, when Mildred is writing from her death bed. She writes things like “I wonder what the cells mutating within my body would turn me into, if they didn’t kill me first” and “The terrifying freedom of knowing that nothing, from now on, will become a memory” and my absolute favorite line: “God is the most uninteresting answer to the most interesting questions.”
Julia Keelty
4.0 out of 5 stars interesting read and character develpment
Reviewed in the United States on September 18, 2023
Ultimately though, the disassociation embedded in all of the relationships made the book a tad to dissected for me. Though I love the writing, I felt the story was not as compelling. The ending was not as revelatory, uniting, or satisfying as i think it was meant to be. Still worth a read, because of the
Author’s talent with words and pacing - but I was not as taken with the overall effort as the Pulitzer committee.
anapurna
3.0 out of 5 stars Too Many Cooks Spoil the Broth
Reviewed in the United States on February 14, 2023
'Trust' by Diaz was long listed for the Booker Prize in 2022. It is a serious fictional work about capitalism, money and one of the richest and greatest stock traders/manipulators of all time. The first third of the novel is written by a fictional writer (not the author) in pretty straightforward narrative form and the writing is impeccable and quite inventive. We learn a great deal about the investor- Benjamin Rask, his family, his trades, his peculiar and idiosyncratic detached lifestyle, and his marrying a woman who also shares some of his quirks, if not particular strong feelings for him. Then the 'novel within the novel' ends and a brief autobiography by Mr. Rask (named Brevel in the book) commences. The writing here is rather listless, and little is added to the first part of the work. As this section concludes, a longer- in fact the longest section of the entire novel takes place, written by the young female secretary of Mr. Brevel in his later years. Frankly, I found this long section to be tired and uninspired, and it appears Hernan Diaz created this long section as a counterpoint to the capitalist system as we know it in the U.S. The secretary's father is a staunch communist and so it is ironic that the secretary is working for the biggest 'capitalist pig' on the planet. The secretary becomes the moral force of the work, and her opinions take on greater urgency as the work progresses. Or at least that is the intended hope of the author, as I read it. "Trust" then concludes with some journal entries written by the wife of Mr. Brevel. Honestly, I could have done without the four section vehicle of the work. It did no favors in showing me the 'truth' of who Mr. Brevel/Rask really was. Perhaps Mr. Diaz, who is a fine writer, felt that he could not write this novel in a traditionally narrative form and utilized the technique of multiple forms to showcase his work. As I read the later sections I asked myself the following questions. Why not include the secretary (and bring her in earlier than after Mrs. Brevel's death) in the original chapters of the original work? Perhaps the diaries of Mrs. Brevel could also have been incorporated as well, without resorting to the four separate narratives. I believe the book is important and has much to contribute to the novels about early 20th century capitalism in this country, so it is still a compelling read. Yet, I wonder how much more enjoyable it would have been if it had stuck to one narrative, instead of running on four tracks at once.

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