Photo: S. Platt / AFP

Benjamin Rask was born into a wealthy tobacco family and never cared where his fortune came from. He was content to excel in all school subjects, indifferent to family pressure and bullying from his classmates.

He was orphaned at an early age and almost accidentally discovered the endless possibilities of financial speculation. Its "mathematical beauty" is the only thing that can connect him to the world. Or exclude him from it, but in a different way.

Helen Brevoort was born into a not-so-wealthy family of Dutch settlers - a sort of aristocracy in New York State - and from an early age she displayed amazing intellectual abilities. Languages, mathematics, philosophy, she absorbed and mastered it all and gained a reputation that protected her from the one thing she feared: other people.

In every novel, these two must meet. And that's what happens in Trust. More precisely, in the first part of the book by Hernán Diaz, a Pulitzer Prize-winning American-Argentine writer and Borges specialist.

It tells the story of the meeting of these two people, brought together by the loneliness of abstractions and the irresistible domination of Benjamin on the financial markets, whose fortune grows with each crisis until he is suspected of having caused the deadliest one, that of 1929.

Vrstevnatý román
In the second part we realize that what we have just read was a short novel. The character who served as a model for Rask, Andrew Bevel, begins to write his autobiography. A few carefully finished pages provide an update on the illness and death of his wife Mildred, who inspired the character Helen.

The rest is basically more or less advanced remarks about the stock market, the American economy and politics, and his own role. Then comes a third text, by one Ida Partenza, an Italian immigrant who became Bevel's secretary and later a successful writer, which recounts an unexpected deal between her and her boss.

This multi-layered book has a fourth element. Mildred Bevel's last diary is the key to what gradually became a mystery. We reveal no more about it and leave it to the reader to discover for himself what Hernán Diaz's mischief has in store for him. Trust also means certainty.

The confidence expected of the reader and the concentration of fictions in four texts that interact, support and contradict each other make for a score that even the music-loving Mildred-Helen would not like and that will enchant the reader.

Humanité /gnews.cz-Jana Černá_07

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