Turgid and tedious, I gave up half way through. Others may praise his insight into class and capitalism, I just found this dull and repetitive

When the Booker longlist was released there weren’t many that caught my eye but this immediately jumped out as something that would be up my street. I had hoped of discovering my 2022 version of Great Circle and The Promise, which were last year’s Booker favourites, but it didn’t quite hit the mark. I raced through the first half of the book and loved the fake novel section in particular, but by the third section I had grown quite bored of the fictional character on which the book centres. I was left longing to learn more about Mrs Rask/Mrs Bevel. Perhaps that was a deliberate choice to keep her character a mystery until the end but it was one that left me a little unsatisfied. I think it is a fine book, however maybe my own expectations of being consumed by it like my previous Booker picks was it’s downfall. I think many people would enjoy this, but I slight miss for me.

This was for me a riveting read, I was totally immersed in the story which starts as a classic novel of relationships a bit à la Henry James. I rooted for this awkward, rich and clever couple and the likely disintegration of their world… but as the novel took another turn, the plot began to thicken… in a most gratifying, entertaining and clever manner which seduced this reader. This is an exploration of wealth, history and its telling/writing, the place and status of women… set in New York during the stupendous financial years of the 20s. I thoroughly enjoyed the writing, the four distinct voices, the conundrums… I definitely will read more by H Diaz, a wonderful discovery through Netgalley, thank you!

My thanks to Pan Macmillan Picador for a review copy of ‘Trust’ by Hernan Diaz. It has recently been long listed for the 2022 Booker Prize for Fiction.

I found ‘Trust’ a fascinating work of literary fiction with an unique structure. It is divided into four parts, each representing a separate manuscript written by a fictional writer.

The first manuscript is ‘Bonds’, a successful 1938 novel about Benjamin Rask, a legendary 1920s Wall Street tycoon and his wife, Helen. Written by Harold Tanner it is considered by many as an ‘obvious roman à clef’ about Andrew and Mildred Bevel containing mysteries and revelations about their glamorous and privileged lives.

The second manuscript, ‘My Life’ is part of an autobiography written by Andrew Bevel. The third is ‘A Memoir, Remembered’ by Ida Partenza, who was hired by Andrew to ghostwrite his memoir. She ponders the relationship between ‘Bonds’, ‘My Life’ and the novel’s final manuscript, ‘Futures’, which is a diary kept by Mildred Bevel, during her time at a sanatorium in Switzerland.

So, yes quite a complex structure with an overall focus upon the American financial world during the 1920s, including the Wall Street Crash of 1929 that led to the Great Depression.

I found myself intrigued and impressed by ‘Trust’. It was undoubtedly beautifully written and elegantly evoked its period setting. I feel that it has the potential to become a modern classic alongside American writers such Tom Wolfe and Don DeLillo.

However, it did require a close reading and I am not certain that on an initial encounter I was able to appreciate fully its layers and subtleties. Still, I expect that an experimental literary novel will be more challenging than most and so not a barrier to my appreciation of its worth.

‘Trust’ is definitely the kind of novel I would categorise as a ‘Booker nominee’ and after reading I am hoping that it makes the Booker shortlist, which will provide me with the perfect reason to read it again in the near future.

4.5 stars rounded up to 5.

A clever novel which plays with favourite literary tropes including unreliable narrators, shifting points of view and retellings of the same story through the medium of different characters. By the end of this four part novel the reader is no less able to decide who to trust than can the people taken in by the financiers manipulations of the money market.

However, although this is cleverly written, I found it difficult to love. Through all four versions of the story the characters remained distanced and enigmatic. And to be honest, it isn’t that interesting a story. The final notebook of Mildred Bevel which contained the apparent ‘truth’ was all too trite to be believable - although of course, that may have been no accurate than the previous versions. The first two versions of the story I found particularly unengaging because they were written in a style that was all ‘telling’ not ‘showing’, and I am surprised the writing was so highly rated that it was added to the Booker long list.

At once, a traditional tale of marriage, an exploration of human nature and the economic system we all share, and an experiment with form. I highly recommend this book.

Trust has had positive reactions from people whose opinion I respect but it just didn't work for me. I enjoyed the novel within a novel, mainly for its depiction of a marriage of introverts and its touch of melodrama. The draft memoir told a largely similar story with a different perspective (and without a novelist's gift for atmosphere) and the later sections, while purportedly different characters, all had the same voice.

I don't really get what's so clever about rehashing the same events from different points of view unless there is drama and revelation throughout - rather than having to churn through reams of wordage for the big reveal. Any decent novelist can sow doubt and suggest different interpretations within the narrative - to me this frame of novel plus (fictional) sources just felt clunky and repetitive.
*
I received a copy of Trust from the publisher via Netgalley.

Wow, wow, wow! Upon reading the blurb I thought I would like this book I was not expecting to lose 24 hours of my holiday to its pages.

A puzzle of a story told through books within a book I through Diaz’s use of structure to be unusual and refreshing. I read a review yesterday which suggested they would have preferred the four sections to intersect but personally the four distinct sections created an interesting layering effect to the story unfolding. The same story told from four different perspectives played with the reader’s understanding of what was true, made you constantly question the validity of the information we had been told and what trust you could place on those telling the story. It is safe to say this structure kept me gripped.

The other aspect of this novel I loved was Diaz’s quality of writing, it takes a real genius to make a novel heavy on financial markets read like a fast paced thriller. I consider myself a fair quick reader but I struggle to read for particularly long periods of time without breaks. It is rare a book is so well written my attention fails to wander, completing a 400 page book in 24 hours is unheard of. But I could have read another 400 pages I loved the author’s style of writing that much.

This book reminded me why I love to read…that feeling of disappearing completely within the pages barely pausing for breath. I am only 6 books into the Booker Longlist but this is my firm favourite so far to take the prize!

Thank you @picadorbooks for my gifted copy

Trust is a cleverly written book, made up of 4 individual "stories" of the life of an incredibly wealthy, but reclusive Financier in the 20's. The first story - Bonds introduces us to the Rasks, this is a very Gatsby style story and one of my favourite parts of the book. The second part is told from by the financier Andrew Bevel who thinks Rask is based in him, I find this part harder to get into, its a sequence of his thoughts / notes. Then we meet Ida Partenza and this brings the story back in to context, although still from Andrew Bevel's perspective. The final chapter is Mildred Bevel and she brings a completely different angle.

Thanks to NetGalley and hte publishers for allowing me to read Trust.

I really enjoyed the different structures presented in this novel, the four different books and the four different voices, a great work of metaficiton. Early 20th century New York is also a fantastic setting for any story truth be told but I thought it was portrayed brilliantly and it does an excellent job at deep diving on wealth, money, power. I enjoyed where the story led. A enjoyable read.

My fifth read from the Booker longlist, Trust is a book about wealth, power and privilege in 1920s/30s New York, but fundamentally it’s a feminist text.

It has an interesting structure, and is effectively four books in one: a biography, draft notes of a memoir, the meat of the novel itself and a hastily sketched diary. The four voices are distinct and the book comes together in the third part with a somewhat predictable conclusion in the fourth and final part. I expected to love this one, but found it just ok.

The experience of reading it reminded me of my days as a trainee solicitor, being asked to write an executive summary for an offering circular or a report, spending days writing it, only to be told the client wants something completely different and to go write it again from scratch.

I didn’t find it as clever as others have found it. Yes, there are layers that are slowly revealed and yes it’s beautifully written, but a lot of the book feels rather, well, pointless. The ultimate reveal in the fourth part was foreseeable pretty early in part three I thought.

My favourite parts of the book were undoubtedly the setting - early 20th century New York is vividly portrayed as the dynamic, beating heart of capitalist America - and the themes of truth, trust and perception and who controls the narrative of history. (I felt that this latter point was rather weakened by Ida’s book remaining unpublished.)

Some have mentioned there’s a lot of talk of money, futures, investments - I didn’t find it excessive. There isn’t an in-depth examination of financial instruments that requires any specialist knowledge I don’t think - it skims the surface, so I wouldn’t let that put you off. Actually, if you have any knowledge of financial instruments you may find yourself short-changed at how conveniently and briefly the fourth part wraps up.

An enjoyable enough read but dare I say it, boring in parts and not the intriguing read I had expected. Liked it but with caveats. 3/5⭐️

You get more than one story for your money in this convoluted novel about money and the capacity of wealth and power, in a Foucault-like sense, to shape reality.

The book kicks off with an apparently straightforward story, Bonds, about a millionaire financier called Benjamin Rask and his rise from nowhere to a position of enormous wealth. It’s a common American trope and in this example Benjamin manoeuvres and manipulates stock markets. Sadly, his wife Helen develops a brain condition which ultimately kills her despite Benjamin’s best efforts to save her, including taking her halfway across the world to a Swiss sanatorium.

Then, there’s a new beginning and the second story is called My Life and is by someone called Andrew Bevel, or more accurately, by his employed ghostwriter, Ida Partenza. She has been specially selected to write the story of Andrew’s life because he has come to believe that Bonds is a veiled, inaccurate and unfriendly unofficial biography of his life and now he wants to tell the truth. Ida’s job is to set the record straight.

In the third story, Ida is looking back on the events which followed and the fourth story is a series of scrambled revelations about Mildred Bezel, the wife of Andrew.

By the end of it, the triangulation of the different aspects of these stories delivers a not unexpected but still surprising ending. The conclusion is that power can be used not only to control but also to silence and to mould people, especially women, reality and institutions. The result is that Mildred Bezel, the woman at the heart of all the stories, only exists on the margins of the text and in the places where she is permitted to exist, while elsewhere she is defined and constructed by others.

It’s a clever book. It was slightly spoiled by the decorative and overwritten style of the first novel which can be understood as the story progresses but grates at the start. The relationship between Ida and Andrew Bevel also stretches reality slightly although it is nice that the only way Ida gets the job is by making her real self invisible. It’s power again!

The novel is long listed for the Booker Prize and is a worthy contestant but I preferred the ideas to the plot if that makes any sense!

I requested Diaz’s ambitious novel as it had been longlisted for the Booker Prize this year and I was keen to see what all the fuss (or shall I say all the ambiguous book reviews) were about. It is certainly an ambitious work of metafiction. In the first part, a novelist called Harold Vanner charts the lives of Benjamin Rask who makes his fortune on Wall Street in the Golden Twenties and his wife Helen whose mental health suffers so much that she eventually withdraws to a Swiss sanatorium. The second part of the book constitutes the unfinished, rather turgid autobiography of another US Banker, Andrew Bevel, whose wife Mildred also has her vulnerabilities. It is only in the third part of the book and with the introduction of a further leading character, journalist Ida Partenza, that we find out how the two bankers are related: Bevel assumes that he and Mildred served as unsuspecting blueprints for the fictionalised Benjamin and Helen Rask, something that enrages him as he does not like the way they are portrayed on the page. Partenza is thus tasked with producing a more flattering life story. The final words, however, belong to Mildred, whose hospital diaries are unearthed by Partenza, and who has things of her own to say…

At over 400 pages, this is a weighty tome of a novel, and there are several passages that could have been cut without affecting the quality of the book. A demanding read because of its ambitious metafictional concept, I would unashamedly recommend ‘Trust’ to readers with perseverance. Thank you to NetGalley and to the publishers for the complimentary ARC that allowed me to produce this book review.

This is a cleverly structured book. We learn about a rich financier‘s life (and wife) from 4 differing points of view, but which is real? It brings a bit of sophistication to the ‘unreliable narrator‘ trope. It dipped in places in the 2nd part, but overall a very enjoyable read.

A puzzle of a book that has to be read to the end. At first I wasn’t sure where it was heading - the contents page lists 4 different sections seemingly written by different (fictional) authors. All this did was raise questions in my mind and the more I read the more curious and intrigued I became. I really enjoyed the period setting, the roaring twenties, lives of the wealthy and social elite but I must admit that some of the financial stuff was a bit over my head - I understood the gist of it but the technical terms and vocabulary were a little bit confusing. I got the overall picture which was the main thing but it was the people in each story that were so fascinating and diverse and the way that their lives were intertwined and the connections that were made between each part of the book The different authors’ voices were distinctive and individual, the writing intelligent and literary, the story so well devised and executed. It is a story within a story, kaleidoscopic in nature and a very satisfying read.


Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for an advanced reader copy - I liked it so much I bought the hardback!

Trust is a difficult book to rate. The financial aspect of the 20s was brilliant. The logic behind investment principles and working for America's good was top-notch – not remotely a bridge too far for those less than savvy on market strategies, like myself. The characters were smart, well defined and each had a unique edge. A book containing four separate, nearly stand-alone, novels worked well in telling the overarching narrative. I liked each booklet quite a bit, some more than others and, though I could see the direction of travel, I was keen to reach the destination.

I suppose my difficulty arises from the close of the final chapter and feeling the destination was not satisfactorily reached. It's easy to see how and why that came to be but it felt a let down? It needed just a wee bit more. It didn't limit my enjoyment and doesn't deter me from recommending this novel. It's well written and thought provoking. Just the glimpse of the magical 20s financial world, before the depression and the Fed, was well worth reading Trust. What an era full of possibility that became skewed with regulation and mass consumption. A golden time in history well captured.

Thank you Netgalley and the publisher for this advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.

Trust is an interesting and unique novel that I’m glad I have read. I was intrigued by the premise of four short stories told from different perspectives/motives. It was truly intriguing and compelling to read on and try to figure out the truth, embellishments and lies in the different versions.
There is obviously a significant amount of detail regarding finance in the 1920/30s which I admit is not a subject I have a great deal of interest or knowledge on. At some points this went a bit over my head but overall I felt I was able to follow along and perhaps even have a greater understanding now than I did before.

This book is longlisted for the Booker Prize and I can understand why it’s unique story telling and writing have been chosen. Overall I enjoyed this book and am thankful to have been given the opportunity to read and review it.

This is a carefully researched and astutely written novel about a century of financial manoeuvring. It describes the psychological issues of some of the leading financiers and demonstrates their ruthless pursuit of influence and wealth. Many of them have problems with their personal lives and relationships. In the latter part of the book, one person is trying to record the experiences of a renowned manipulator. That part of the book is more drawn out and harder to read in its detail. This is an important contribution to financial history rather than being an exciting read.

Four different stories, written 4 different ways. The same person but different, lies and truths.

An interesting and interestingly written novel , if at times a little confusing.
Lots of information included about American finance, particularly of the 20's and 30's . If at times I didn't understand I looked it up! Gave me The Gilding Age vibes.

Each part has it's own voice and style of narration, which separated them from one another and gave the brain something 'fresh' to engage with each time, yet still following the same story line.
I'm not sure if I quite understood it all, lots of questions still I'm unable to answer, but it was interesting to give it a go.
A very original piece and I can see why it has made the Booker Prize Longlist

Trust by Hernan Diaz, which has been longlasting for the Booker Prize, is one of those difficult novels to review without giving much of the game away. At its most basic it is the story of financier Benjamin Rask, his wire Helen, and how they survived the Wall Street Crash and what happened to then after. Only Diaz does not present the story straight: there are four elements at play here: a novel within a novel, an autobiography, a journal and a memoir. These four elements provide a prism through which we learn of the life of Bennjamin Rask.

It is an interesting way in which to present your 'hero', and much of your enjoyment will come down to how much you appreciate meta-narratives, pastiche and authorial trickery. If you submit to Diaz's construction, this is quite the treat. If you don't enjoy the construction and prefer a more linear narrative then this one might frustrate you. I enjoyed my time in this world - and though not all of it worked all of the time for me - this is still a very fine novel with a lot to recommend it.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publishers for the ARC.