Recently, I was impressed by Pullitzer Prize Book List that I explored it through book platform and came across Trust. The synopsis interests me that I was curious how a book that tells a story about a wealthy family win such an award. Glas that i picked and rerad it because this book shows how complicated people’s inner lives can be, especially when shaped by money and influence. Hernan Diaz writes in a way that captures both the characters’ thought processes and the broader realities of a society where capitalism holds most of the power.

The novel unfolds through parallel narratives, each offering a different angle on the same world. Most of the scenes are set in New York, and they follow fictional wealthy figures as they navigate several periods of financial crisis, panic, and recession.

Trust looks at how money can distort reality. Diaz explores the long-standing myths around American financial power and the quiet histories that get buried under them. Many narratives about wealth and the “self-made” white man avoid discussing where the money truly comes from and what conditions allow that success to exist. Diaz brings those questions into focus, showing how these silences function to protect certain people and institutions from taking responsibility for the labor and relationships that made their wealth possible. The shifting perspectives make it clear how easily stories about the rich can be shaped, polished, or adjusted depending on who is telling them. It suggests that fiction can reveal truths that people prefer not to confront directly. Through its structure, this novel highlights how storytelling, both personal and public. It can reshape mistakes and turn them into acceptable versions of reality.

Trust is a carefully constructed exploration of wealth, narrative control, and the hidden forces behind financial power. It offers a clear, layered look at the stories that sustain economic myths and the realities they often leave unspoken.

My Favorite Bits

• She could feel herself think differently and knew that, in the end, it did not matter whether this feeling was based on reality or fantasies. What mattered was that she was unable to stop thinking about her thoughts. Her speculations reflected one another, like parallel mirrors—and, endlessly, each image inside the vertiginous tunnel looked at the next wondering whether it was the original or a reproduction. This, she told herself, was the beginning of madness. The mind becoming the flesh for its own teeth.

• Because she felt lost in the new tyrannical architecture of her brain, and because she no longer trusted her thoughts or her memory, she started relying on her journals, which she kept with daily rigor. She hoped her future self, the one reading the diaries, would be able to use those writings as a measure of how far into her delirium she had gone. Would she see herself on the page? She addressed herself constantly in her entries, asking herself to believe that it was, in fact, she who had written those words in the past-even if her future self refused to believe it; even if, as she read, she were unable to recognize her own handwriting.

• Only a fool would distinguish past from present in such a way. The future irrupts at all times, wanting to actualize itself in every decision we make; it tries as hard as it can, to become the past. This is what distinguishes the future from mere fancy. The future happens. (..) And what is choice but a branch of the future grafting itself onto the stem of the present?

• Nothing more harmful to the sick than disappointment.

• Every life is organized around a small number of events that either propel us or bring us to a grinding halt. We spend the years between these episodes benefiting or suffering from their consequences until the arrival of the next forceful moment. A man’s worth is established by the number of these defining circumstances he is able to create for himself. He need not always be successful, for there can be great honor in defeat. But he ought to be the main actor in the decisive scenes in his existence, whether they be epic or tragic.

• Every single one of our acts is ruled by the laws of economy. When we first wake up in the morning we trade rest for profit. When we go to bed at night we give up potentially profitable hours to renew our strength. And throughout our day we engage in countless transactions. Each time we find a way to minimize our effort and increase our gain we are making a business deal, even if it is with ourselves. These negotiations are so ingrained in our routine that they are barely noticeable. But the truth is our existence revolves around profit.

• “.. The more people partake in your everyday life, the more entitled they feel to spread stories about you. I’ve always find this baffling. You’d think closeness would engender trust.”

• “Mainly my friends. That’s what they think friendship means: the freedom to turn you into a topic of conversation.”

• “A nation’s prosperity is based on nothing but a multitude of egoisms aligning until they resemble what is known as the common good. Get enough selfish individuals to converge and act in the same direction, and the result looks very much like a collective will or a common cause. But once this illusory public interest is at work, people forget an all-important distinction: that my needs, desires and cravings may mirror yours does not mean we have a shared goal. It merely means we have the same goal. This is a crucial difference. I will only cooperate with you as long as it serves me. Beyond that, there can only be rivalry or indifference.”

• Nothing more private than pain. It can only involve one. But who? Who is “I” in “I hurt”? The one who inflicts the pain or the one who suffers it? And does “hurt” refer to the inflicting or the suffering?

• Some journals are kept with the unspoken hope that they will be discovered long after the diarist’s death, the fossil of an extinct species of one. Others thrive on the belief that the only time each evanescent word will be read is as it’s being written. And others yet address the writer’s future self: one’s testament to be opened at one’s resurrection. They declare, respectively, “I was,” “I am,” “I’ll be.” Over the years, my diary has drifted form one of these categories to the next and then back. It still does, even if my future is shallow.

• I know my days are numbered, but not every day is a real number.

• God is the most uninteresting answer to the most interesting questions.

• Stocks, shares and all that garbage are just claims to a future value. So if money is fiction, finance capital is the fiction of a fiction. That’s what all those criminals trade in: fictions… Money is at the core of it all. An illusion we’ve all agreed to support. Unanimously.

---

Author: Hernan Diaz
Publication date: 3 May 2022
Number of pages: 402 pages

---