Book Review: TRUST by Hernan Diaz

Trust by Hernan Diaz
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"History itself is just a fiction - a fiction with an army. And reality? Reality is a fiction with an unlimited budget... And how is reality funded? With yet another fiction: money... An illusion we've all agreed to support."

There's nothing quite like that sweet feeling, upon closing a book, when you loudly proclaim (to your book club, if you're lucky enough to belong in one; or to the air for an audience of one) "No wonder it won the Pulitzer!"

Hernan Diaz takes the unreliable narrator and gives you four of them, trusting the reader to form our own version of events from the four novellas in this single one.

Music plays an important role in the narrative. Imagine a fugue of four separate motifs, some interweaving with others, but ultimately, only the reader/listener can determine which notes ring true, and which are false.

What exactly is TRUST all about? It's a very original take on the power of narrative, simultaneously a story of a marriage, and of the American economy in the early 1900's. It's about money, and how powerful those with money are. Powerful enough to change reality itself, or at least, the prevailing narratives. A history rewritten, with people in power having undesirable events erased from all records, as if they had never taken place.

This book has special resonance for me, as our country is in the middle of a controversial educational overhaul, and one subject in particular seems to be affected. That's right. History.

And this is the beautiful thing about literary fiction, of which TRUST is one of the best exemplars. They're like whetstones for the mind, training us to sift through the daily barrage of mediated news and content, teaching us how to piece together a cohesive truth from the bits and pieces of crumbs we get.

History, after all, is a kind of a story. And we need to study it, if there's any hope for future generations to avoid repeating mistakes of elections past.



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