Trust by Hernan Diaz

Trust by Hernan Diaz – Audio

Book Blurb:

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 boundless 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.

My Review: 2.75 stars

Click here to order on Amazon

Trust by Hernan Diaz won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and it has been a long-anticipated book that I’ve owned since it was released. Why I didn’t pick it up earlier is unbeknownst to me but as all readers know, sometimes picking your next book is just a “mood reader” kind of thing.  When I saw it was available on audio through Penguin Random House audio, I started it immediately. 

I’m not sure if my expectations for the book were too high with all the praise it garnered but for me, this one didn’t delight as I thought it would. I found the writing stunningly astute and the structure intriguing. This is what I’d call a true literary novel, one in which the writing is better than the storyline for the average reader. I’ll say it here; I was bored.

I’m sure many of you will come at me, but the title, eliciting trust was off the mark. With distinct narratives from different POVs, I had no idea who to trust. The hereditary mental illness was interesting and again, the unique structure of a book within a book, a memoir and bits of a diary was creative. Am I glad I listened to it? Sure. Would I recommend? Only to the literary readers.

Quotes I liked:

Reality is a fiction with an unlimited budget.”

“The word I was typing was always in the past while the word I was thinking of was always in the future, which left the present oddly uninhabited.”

“God is the most uninteresting answer to the most interesting questions.”