Pulitzer winner shares Trust with China readers

Within Johann Sebastian Bach's polyphony — with its repetition, inversion and reversion — novelist Hernan Diaz found inspiration, penning Trust, in a book-within-a-book format, exploring family, wealth and ambition, that won him the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Since the recent publication of its Chinese version, Diaz, who was born in Argentina, raised in Sweden and currently lives in the United States, embarked on his first journey to China, a novel land for him. It was also his first trip to East Asia.

From May 11 to 17, the author was held to a tight schedule of public appearances and book signings in Shanghai, Beijing, and Nanjing, the provincial capital of East China's Jiangsu province, where he met Chinese counterparts, critics and a group of serious readers who are particularly curious about the male writer who cares for, studies and raises women's voices through storytelling.

Trust revolves around the mysterious wealthy couple Andrew and Mildred Bevel in New York, who earned an exponential fortune during the Great Depression in the late 1920s and '30s.

The story is told in a quartet of narratives rendered in different literary styles, forming integral material for understanding the wealth growth and intimate life of the couple.

The first narrative, Bonds: A Novel, is credited to a fictitious Harold Vanner, followed by the second narrative, an unfinished autobiography of the husband as a result of his anger toward Vanner's work, in which Helen Rask, a character based on Mildred Bevel, struggles with mental illness in the last days of her life.

The third narrative is a memoir of Andrew Bevel's ghostwriter behind his autobiography, Ida Partenza, daughter of an Italian anarchist. In the 1980s, 70-year-old Partenza steps into the Bevels' former residence and, while reviewing their archives, discovers the brief, fragmented but profound journals of Mildred Bevel written before her death — the fourth narrative.

As Diaz's rigorous writing unfolds, previous plots become doubtful and overturned. "I thought it would be much more interesting to have readers experience these different voices and feel them," Diaz told China Daily about the polyphonic structure of his work.

"There isn't just a monolithic truth," Diaz says. "Truth emerges from the intersection of many different stories on the negotiation of different points of view, and out of the noisy, messy and confusing dissonance of the various voices emerges something we could precariously call truth."

Everything is prismatic; such unstable, questionable, nonfinal "truth" should be revised, revisited and critiqued, he adds.

The author thus provides a piece of advice in facing an age where reality itself has become a luxury: "I fail all the time and it's not a comfortable position to be in, but I try to be flexible and limber. I try to find a very difficult balance between a sort of paranoia and a firm belief that truth is something that we may never attain but it's worth looking for and fighting for.

"Believe in truth but don't believe in those who say they have the truth."

Zhang Li, a professor from the School of Chinese Language and Literature at Beijing Normal University, says the novel reminds her of lychee.

"At first, it read like the hard shell of lychee and I didn't like it that much. Then I touched the soft part and sensed there was something with power. I removed it and saw the hard core — in terms of this novel, it's the incognito, silenced female who wants to reclaim the power of narrative and be discovered," she commented during a public dialogue with Diaz at the Columbia Global Centers in Beijing on May 15.

One major intention behind Diaz's work is the fact that all over the world, the voices of women, making up half of the human population, have long been suppressed.

Despite his self-proclaimed low-key, moderate attitude, he claims it's difficult to find the perfect way to put his views on women-related topics, and points out the period in US history when women were excluded from the financial world.

Their exposure was limited to wife or secretary, and it was not until 1967 that the New York Stock Exchange allowed its first female floor broker and not until the 1960s could women open a bank account without a male cosigner, Diaz adds.

For decades women were associated mainly with domestic genres of writing like letters and diaries, whereas men could give speeches, write novels and make public pronouncements.

"If Trust had a volume control, it lowered the more you read until you were left with this whisper," Diaz says about the difference in volume of the two genders' voices. "We have been taught to trust more in the voices that are louder, which of course is entirely wrong."

Diaz says he tries to strive for true equality of the voices between genders while at the same time highlighting the differences in these voices — a paradox in a way that "if you say there are no male or female voices, that's wrong; but if you say there is a big difference between them, that's also wrong".

He adds that such paradox only stresses how important the problem is, and the complication makes him want to understand it better.

In Trust, Partenza endeavors to accustom herself to men's thinking and write in a man's way, whereas in reality, Diaz's writing partly involves viewing the world with a woman's mind and hand.

To get to such a place, he absorbed the views of female writers he appreciates — Virginia Woolf, for example — as well as diaries and personal letters of wives of historical financial tycoons that have been untouched in libraries or archives for almost a century.

In Shanghai, amid a pressing schedule, Diaz was taken to visit the well-known matchmaking corner inside the Renmin Park, where crowds made up of anxious parents hang personal information about their adult children — age, educational background, income, family assets, contacts, and more — in search of an appropriate partner for them. Diaz was fascinated.

"There's a great novel there waiting to be written," he says. "Care and affection are universal." Parenthood — the intimacy and love, the patriarchal order and control that cuts across class and political divides — is another major concern in his novel.

According to Peng Lun, who runs indie literary publisher Archipel Press, a co-publisher of the Chinese edition of Trust, a Chinese edition for Diaz's other novel, In the Distance, is underway.

"Although Diaz only has two works published, he's a very mature novelist who knows exactly what he wants and has a strong ability to control it," Peng says.

He adds that literature, in essence, presents life and many foreign works are helping Chinese readers understand others more while getting to know themselves better.