Diaz’s Trust

Hernan Diaz’s celebrated second novel, Trust, is a story about a New York investor who, along with his wife, gets rich by predicting and betting against the stock market crash of 1929.

Composed of four separate documents – a novel-within-the-novel, an unfinished manuscript, a memoir and a diary – Trust’s unique structure allows the characters to tell their own stories. Providing the reader with differing and conflicting narratives about the same period, subjects, relationships, and events.

With each section of the book challenging the claims of the previous ones, Diaz leaves it to us to discover the truth behind the lives and successes of Mildred and Andrew Bevel.

And since its publication in May of 2022, this historical novel has been listed as the book of the year by over 30 publications. It has also won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

In retrospect, Trust’s popularity is not that surprising.

For this is a book about the reality-warping force of money and the ease with which power can manipulate facts. Where visibility, narratives of success and accolades are molded, assigned and re-purposed by those who, through either wealth or gender, are powerful enough to obscure some inconvenient truths while embellishing others.

And this is what makes Trust a very timely and relatable book for our Ethiopian readership. For what better time is there to discuss how power shifts and maneuvers in order to remain in control? Especially when we live in a time of staggering income inequality, high inflation, underemployment and gender disparity.

Where any talk of structural solutions to our social and economic woes is silenced by the drivel of the privileged few. The likes of which resemble Trust’s main protagonist. Those so-called “self-made men” who see entrepreneurship as a form of patriotism, prosperity as proof of an individual’s genius and any talk of nationwide hardships as the annoying and unwarranted grumblings of the unlucky and equally unmotivated. All the while exploiting, benefiting from and laying claim on the labor and contributions of those on the lower rungs of our society.

So for those of you interested in listening to those who have been forgotten, exploited or silenced by the self-serving success stories of the economically powerful and socially privileged, Trust is the book for you.