Yan Xiang Jin Hengshan text.
There are two Pulitzer Prize-winning works in 2023, namely "The Devil's Copperhead" by Barbara Kingsolver (Barbarakingsolver) and "Trust" by Argentine-American writer Hernandiaz. This is the first time since the establishment of the Pulitzer Prize in 1917 that the ** prize has been awarded to two works at the same time.
The Pulitzer Prize adheres to the usual practice of awarding the prize "to an American writer who has published within a year, preferably an outstanding depiction of American life", and the two awards** do show a certain silhouette of American history and culture from different angles. The Associated Press report reads: "Diaz said in an interview that his book and Kintsovo's **from different angles** share a similar theme — class." "The Demon Copperhead" dramatically depicts the extreme divide between the rich and the poor in the lower classes;"Trust" is a reflection on how such a world came to be. Under this theme, "Trust" actually has a more complex and rich connotation.
The official Pulitzer Prize citation reads: "Set in the United States of the past, this riveting ** explores family, wealth, and ambition through interconnected narratives of different literary styles, offering a complex examination of love and power in a country dominated by capitalism." "Trust is about money, especially the illusory power of money in the marketplace, and its potential to 'distort and adjust reality' to its own ends," NPR's book review reads. "The book is very much about money, and the gravitational twisting reality that money has and the ability to create myths around itself," said author Diaz on The Seth Evening Talk Show.
"Trust" is composed of four chapters with a certain degree of independence, bridging the four parts tightly with money and the exploration of the truth, while revealing a corner of the operation mechanism of wealth in American capitalist society, it also gives readers a glimpse of the accumulation of capital, how capital and the appendages of capital power construct the so-called "truth", how money affects and even distorts interpersonal relationships, the identity of women in the narrative about the financial industry, the suppressed voices and truths in history, the desire and illusion of the characters' self-shaping, Complex topics such as the pitfalls in the realization of the American dream. The reader is immersed in an archive, guided by carefully arranged materials to find the truth behind the mystery.
Separate narratives in different genres:
"Trust" as a whole and part of the narrative
The structure of Trust is both innovative and controversial. The four chapters are layered through the narrative, giving the reader a deciphered reading experience, but some critics have also said that the quality of the four parts is slightly uneven, especially the first two parts, which occupy half of the book, and cannot be called concise and powerful. But on the whole, Diaz is still comfortable switching between different genres of writing and narrative perspectives, and he always firmly controls the main direction of **, so that readers will not get lost in seemingly unrelated texts.
* An important stylistic feature is the use of a matryoshka doll in which another story is applied to the story, and a seemingly true story is created under the name of another writer.
The first part is written by a writer named Harold Vanne, and revolves around financial tycoon Benjamin Lasker and his wife, Helen. The story ends with Helen's death from mental illness and Benjamin's business empire losing its former glory.
The second part is the unfinished autobiography of New York financial legend Andrew Beever. He elaborated on the process of building his capital empire, and emphasized that his wealth was able to accumulate in large quantities because it was in line with the needs of the country's development. His wife, Mildred, was a philanthropist and passionate artist, and sponsored many people in the arts and culture circle at the time, but she died of cancer at an early age, leaving him with permanent regret.
The narrative form of both parts has a strong sense of realism, which is close to the actual record. With this documentary-like narrative, Diaz clearly wants to do enough to show the "truth".
*The third part, which continues this "writer's own story" narrative, is the memoir of Ida Patansha, an Italian-American woman. Ida was hired by Andrew Beaver as his biographer because of his outstanding writing skills, and used his autobiography to refute what Vanna wrote based on him. In Ada's account, Bever's image becomes more complex. Not only did he reinvent his image, but he also used money to limit the circulation of Vanna's books, thereby manipulating the image of the deceased Mildred, controlling truth and history to some extent. This brings us to the book's most crucial suspense: what kind of person is Mildred?Her image-making process goes straight to the most profound part of the book.
At the same time, Ada herself has a complicated relationship with money. Her father was a no-** who despised money and hated capital, and the place where she worked was at the center of New York's financial world. Money has a profound impact on their lives, and at one point prompted Ada's father to steal her manuscripts, leading to emotional and even moral conflicts.
Bever's sudden death makes the autobiography unfinished, and Ida returns to Bever's mansion, which has been converted into a museum, years later, to try to unravel the mystery of Mildred's identity with the help of materials. The fourth part is Mildred's messy diary, which shows her extremely high ** and financial talent. As Beaver built his capital empire, he relied heavily on Mildred for decision-making, but the relationship between the two gradually became ossified. This may explain Bever's intent on weakening the image of his wife in his autobiography and blocking and erasing Vanne's work. In this part, Bever's positive image is further shattered, as if the building was collapsing.
In addition to the genre characteristics, the narrative characteristics of the four parts are also different. For example, the first part has plain language and simple plot, with few character dialogues and emotional expressions. Diaz himself calls it "a very cautious turn-of-the-century prose style, but with a punk rock provocation at its core," and the New York Times editor calls the film in the style of "Henry James" or "Edith Wharton." The third part unfolds from a first-person perspective, using fonts to distinguish between the present and past stories, and has a lot of dialogue descriptions. The third chapter is like a "montage" in the movie, which intersperses two events at the same time, which is quite graphic, which shows the author's pen power.
In the fourth part, which is relatively independent, Mildred's figurative questions and progressively complex themes run through it give the reader a complete and novel reading experience. The reader's constant trust in the narrator and the constant disenchantment of trust as new material comes true, just as in an archive room to peel back the cocoon and dig out the truth. Diaz not only writes the legend of a fictional character, but also presents the formation of history and the search for truth.
Complex topics raised by money:
The shaping and dismantling of "trust".
The brilliance of Diaz's writing also lies in his attention to detail. The complexity of ** lies not only in the diversity and complexity of the genre and the bold independent arrangement, but also in the fact that its brushwork maximizes the integration of money and human nature, and deeply reveals the pervasive penetration of money into people's life, emotions, history and truth.
This is evident from the title of the book "Trust" and its sections. **The word "trust" not only means mutual trust between people, but also implies another meaning, that is, "trust" in financial terms, where the settlor transfers the rights of his property to the trustee for management. The first part of the title, "Bonds", means both "bonds" and "bonds" between people, as well as "shackles". It is both the key to the financial genius Lasker's fortune and the fragile bond between people, and after his wife, Helen, falls into mental insanity, the "bond" becomes the "shackle" she wears. The fourth part is entitled "Futures", which not only means "things in the future", but also means "**", that is, to purchase goods according to the agreement or ** and deliver them in the future. In this part, the plot of the previous article has been reversed, and the performance is exactly similar to the unexpected results that often occur in the process of doing **.
*, bonds, ** and other assets are included in the scope of trust property, and behind the trust is change and impermanence, and even indifference and abandonment. The clever use of this pun not only alludes to the logic of content and finance, but also shows the subtlety, complexity and speculation of human nature. Diaz's story structure and characterization are truly exquisite.
Money is not limited to influencing the present or the individual, but even has the ability to rewrite history and distort the truth. Andrew Bever, dissatisfied with Vanna's work based on his life, controlled the circulation of the book by controlling the publishing house, and fought a lawsuit to make Vanna no longer have the energy to continue writing. The library's collection of books was also removed, and Vanna and his work disappeared from public view. By rewriting his autobiography, Bever tries to shape a history that conforms to his own subjective wishes, using money to complete the diffusion of his own words. The reader also begins to reflect on the fact that the truth of history may well be hidden behind artificially modified narratives, waiting for the "truth to be revealed" that may never come.
In an interview with NPR, Diaz said: "The film 'Trust' is very much concerned with the difference between history and **. In other words, Diaz deliberately creates and dismantles the three levels of "trust" between characters and characters, characters and readers, and authors and readers, so that Ida becomes the "detective" in the work, and the reader becomes the "detective" of the book, relying on one material after another to uncover the truth of the past.
In the process of reading "Trust", readers are highly involved in the construction and deconstruction of the characters. Diaz also redefines the relationship between the author and the reader through this four-part independent writing. The author is no longer the owner of the omniscient perspective, but the narrator hidden behind four different narrators, presenting the reader with different materials, and the real stitching and reasoning are done by the reader. A seemingly reliable narrative can be the result of distortion, and behind a seemingly simple story there is also an implicit complex process. It is precisely because the "trust" between the author and the reader becomes difficult to achieve due to the reversal of the plot and the cunning of the narrative that the difference between ** and history that Diaz wants to reveal becomes particularly profound.
Trust may not be the first to grab the reader's attention, but it's definitely worth the patience. The first and second parts may seem lengthy and boring to some readers, but in the third part, the mystery is slowly solved, and the trust that had been built up in half a book is dissolved, and the reader suddenly realizes what the book is really good about. From this point of view, Diaz is not reconstructing the "trust" between the author and the reader. From believing to skeptical to convinced, the interaction between the reader and the author is also implicit in this structure.
Afterglow of the 20s of the last century:
America in miniature in "Trust".
In addition to its success in literary narrative, Trust responds to the realities of the United States. The Los Angeles Times commented on the book under the headline "Hernán Diaz Jigsaw, Aiming to Uncover the Truth of American Mythology." In many ways, this book is indeed a "American" one. The history of Lasker or Bever's origins began with the tobacco industry, then gained capital accumulation through investment wars, and finally abandoned industry to invest in finance and finance, and controlled the entire business ...... through the manipulation of ** and bondsThis is undoubtedly a microcosm of the history of the development of the American financial empire.
The process of capital accumulation has been throughout American history, but Diaz deliberately set the background in the 20s and 30s of the 20th century, and the reasons for this have been frequently asked. To this response, Diaz said: "We have all these narratives about this era, but I think that behind these rigid narratives there are some voices and certain fragments of history that are silenced, and I am interested in that. In an interview with The Guardian, he said, "I think I was attracted to America's obsession with portraying itself as fictional." The genre of Westerns created an exotic atmosphere for Americans themselves, and I see this in my depictions of the Roaring '20s and the subsequent Great Depression. ”
In addition to the above emotional expression, in a money-themed **, the United States of this period does have reasons worthy of being written about and revisited. The twenties of the twentieth century was a period of sustained economic prosperity in the United States, and the great strides of commerce and industry led to significant changes in the culture and lifestyle of the entire society. The Great Depression that began in 1929 came to an abrupt end, and it was only when the economic bubble burst that the ideas and hidden dangers that had been suppressed and ignored during the boom were noted. During this period, the financial world experienced one of the most impactful economic crises of the twentieth century, witnessing the most contrasting prosperity and downfall.
Although money has always been an unavoidable theme in American literature, few works have been written about the process of money and finance itself, and more often than not, "[they] have already made money, and only the symptoms related to money: the narrow-minded behavior of the rich, etc." "Trust" does not follow this fixed model, but fills this gap by starting from the details and providing an almost empirical and serious description of many financial and business processes. Diaz deliberately wrote the unfamiliar "money discourse" into his **, but at the same time, he also tried to show that the expression of this discourse is essentially intended to reveal the mysterious life and human nature itself, and the lifelong struggle to realize the American dream for money is ultimately only to establish the system and authority of money itself, but the person in the struggle does not know where to go and loses himself.
If money is the "explicit" theme of this **, then Diaz's reflection on the American economic empire built on an unreliable foundation, and the rewriting of history and truth by power is a more thought-provoking "hidden" theme. Mildred, for example, represents a female perspective that is often hidden in the world of money. Diaz argues that the narrative of wealth is a world where women are missing, "who are relegated to wife, secretary, or victim at best." These are the three roles they have been given in history and **. So I want to subvert those stereotypes a little bit."
Ada, another female character in the book, also shows the lives of immigrants in New York from a perspective, reflecting the immigrant community's thinking about culture, identity, and values. Diaz himself is an immigrant of Argentine origin, whose parents moved to Sweden when he was two years old and later moved back to Argentina. Diaz then lived in London before moving to Brooklyn, New York, where he lived for 25 years. He speaks Spanish at home, Swedish at school, and has a good command of English. In an interview, he said, "I don't think it's possible for you to write about New York without writing about immigration. It's a city of immigrants, and all of us are. "Trust really fits the element of immigration into the narrative perfectly.
Jumping out of the context of the 20s and 30s of the 20th century, the discussion of the way truth and history is recorded has profound implications in today's society. The popularity of social networking has made it difficult to verify the truth of contemporary society. For the United States, this topic has received special attention since the election of Donald Trump in 2016. In the post-epidemic era, looking back at the financial crisis in 2008 and Wall Street in 2011**, as well as the financial situation of many people during the epidemic, many rich people can take this opportunity to become more wealthy, and people have begun to realize that the influence of money is far from the gap in material life, and the impact of the class gap is profoundly shaping the way different people perceive the world. Money, history, and America, the essence of these questions can be found in the reflections on money and truth in "Trust".