Trust in Big Book Summer Reading Challenge 2022

May 20, 2022 Karen rated it really liked it

Shelves: booktopia-2022, 2022-published-books-read-in-2022

****Update: Pulitzer Prize winner 2023****
I have been considering reading this book again. After yesterday's announcement of the prize, I definitely will!!

I met the author recently at a weekend book event and found him so engaging. Loved his enthusiasm! It made me so excited to read this book. Prior to starting it I watched a segment on Seth Meyers when the author was his guest and I also listened to both Barnes and Noble podcast Poured Over and the NYT bookreview podcasts, which praised this bo ...more

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May 14, 2022 Kate rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 2023-read, 2022-read, 2022-booktopia, bookthewriter

The structure of this novel is unusual. I listened to the author on the NYT book Review Podcast and then I met him in person. It is composed of 4 documents which all tell the same story, in 4 different ways written by 4 different authors. At its heart, it is about money. Not average hedge fund money, but captain of industry money, if your industry is money. Taking place in the 1920s, Andrew Bevel is all about playing the stock market and investing more than wisely. Desperate to control all aspec ...more

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Apr 18, 2022 Linda rated it really liked it

Shelves: booktopia, 2022, arc, fiction, e-book, vt-2022-author

I need to thank Edelweiss for allowing me access to an early e-ARC. This is one of the books about to presented at Booktopia.
I was a little confused at the beginning. After reading the first section and starting the second, I thought I was reading a book of short stories. I'm hoping that when the book is published either the book cover flaps or an introduction will point out that this is actually one story.
The crux is that a prominent businessman widower is not happy with a fiction book that is ...more

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Jun 13, 2022 Dawn rated it it was amazing

Shelves: favorites

I had almost zero knowledge and minimal expectations going into this book. It was Roxane Gay's pick for her Literati book club, so I went along for the ride.
What a joy to discover what I'm sure will be one of my top reads of the year. I just ... loved it. I didn't want it to end. ...more

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Jul 18, 2022 Deb rated it really liked it

Very uniquely written this novel is broken up into 4 stories. The first part is a book with in our novel. The storyline reminded me so much of Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. Then we get book two which tells another story. At this point I wasn't sure where all this was going. It didn't really grab me but as I began part 3 I was so hooked and began to understand the first two parts. I'm glad I continued through to the heart of this story! ...more

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Jul 24, 2022 Sue rated it it was amazing

Shelves: booktopia-2022

Magnificent!

In the running for my favorite book of the year.

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Jan 04, 2025 Suzan Jackson rated it really liked it

Shelves: book-group-book, historical-fiction, award-winners, coming-of-age, aging

I had the pleasure of meeting the author in 2022, the weekend this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel was released, at Booktopia. None of us knew then what a huge hit (and award winner) it would turn out to be! It's divided into four parts, and each part is a separate written piece by a different character: a novel written about a wealthy financier and his wife, a partially-finished autobiography, a memoir by a journalist, and journal entries from another character. It shows how the exact same situati ...more

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Nov 26, 2024 Patricia E. Harding rated it really liked it

I didn’t know what Trust by Hernan Diaz was about when I checked it out of the library. A friend had posted about it being one of the best books he had ever read, earning the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It shot to the top of my Want To Read List. (I keep my list sorted by rating. That’s how I choose the next book to read.)

After reading the first several pages, I still didn’t know what the book was about. Its language sounded similar to a few books I had read earlier this year. My book club I didn’t know what Trust by Hernan Diaz was about when I checked it out of the library. A friend had posted about it being one of the best books he had ever read, earning the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It shot to the top of my Want To Read List. (I keep my list sorted by rating. That’s how I choose the next book to read.)

After reading the first several pages, I still didn’t know what the book was about. Its language sounded similar to a few books I had read earlier this year. My book club read a series of futuristic-themed books published in the late 1800s and early 1900s (It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis and The Iron Heel by Jack London, for example.) The writing style of Part I of Trust sounded similar to those books, with little action and not much dialog, before writers were trained to show, don't tell.

When I began reading Part II of the book, I realized something was up. This is no ordinary novel. The further I got into the story, the unraveling of the plot and the depth of the characters, the more intrigued I became.

Hernan Diaz is a genius writer who conceived and successfully wrote a logistically complicated story. How in the world did he keep the details straight? The nuances and beauty of all the layers. Diaz takes us from the cold, ugly, stoic world of capital and finance to the most beautiful, marbled world of a woman’s brilliant mind. He shows us how the world is designed to muffle that mind, to hide it under a bushel.

The story takes place in New York City during different periods; I’ll call them the past-past, the past, and the present. Each part of the story is told by a different narrator, sometimes third person, sometimes first. The plot is a bit of a puzzle to figure out. The reveal is all too familiar to women even—especially—in 2024.

Each of the four parts tells a different point of view of the same story, more or less. The main characters are wealthy New York couples, Benjamin and Helen Rask and Andrew and Mildred Bevel. In contrast, secretary/typist/writer Ida Partenza and her Italian immigrant/revolutionary father struggle with scarce income and the shroud of Ida’s father’s anti-capitalist political rants. Ida goes to work for Andrew Bevel and discovers the mystery behind the family’s financial success (and the nation’s 1929 financial collapse.)

One of the themes running through the story is success—what is success? How do we measure it? How do we know when we are successful? Ida’s father struggled financially as a printer, but as a father, he had great success raising an intuitive and intelligent daughter. He helped her see her worth.

Another theme might be honesty or, as the novel is called, trust. It’s quite a play on words, given the financial themes. The public face of the financial world is like a room full of smoke and mirrors, but there’s a wizard behind the curtain. How much of what we (regular nonwealthy people) see is a facade? How strong or fragile are the money systems? Can a few people manipulate the market and prosper while the rest of us lose our shirts?

Finally—I’ll try not to give anything away—how many fraudsters have usurped women's intelligence throughout modern history? I’ve read recently that women helped write the stories of The Iliad. Homer merely collected the works and had them published under his name. I also read that women wrote some of Shakespeare’s plays. Because it was against the law for women to publish, they were published under Shakespeare’s name. Even Jodi Picoult’s By Any Other Name (2024) contains a writer protagonist who must use deception to have her work published. Have you ever sat in a meeting and had a male co-worker present your ideas as his own?

I’ve never read a book quite like this one. It almost lost me initially, and even in the end, I felt lost with the many music and financial references. Nevertheless, I was bedazzled by Mildred's beautiful world and insightful mind. She certainly had a kaleidoscope of thoughts with many shapes and colors.

She had a gift for seeing and experiencing the world in a way few people did. “Each particle of light has travelled from the sun to my feet. How can something so small have made it so far?”

How many Mildreds have we overlooked and lost because we don’t value women’s minds? How much more advanced might our world be if we had always nurtured women’s minds and accepted their ideas into the world’s knowledge base? Mildred’s cancerous death is symbolic of the suffering death of half of the world’s possibilities.

I’ll be talking about this book for a long time, contemplating the stories and how they were told, wondering what Diaz’s impetus was for writing Trust in such an unconventional way. ...more

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May 20, 2024 Rachelle rated it really liked it

Shelves: fiction, book-club-made-me-read-it

The structure of this book is fascinating. I had to have patience during the first part, but it paid off in the next three. This book will make you think!

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Jul 01, 2022 A Kibler rated it really liked it

So glad I got to hear Hernan Diaz speak before reading this book. It was important to know he wrote it in 4 documents, each by different people: a fictional biography, an autobiography, a memoir, and a journal. He says this is a novel about money, not class, but it is also a novel about how we see ourselves and how we want others to see us. Very well done.

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