Although it is the Argentine writer that everyone talks about, the two novels he has published so far have been written in English and have only recently been read in Spanish. The thing is Hernan Diaz (50) has been living and working in New York for 25 years, the city where he received his doctorate and where he teaches at the Columbia University.
The novels in question; “In the distance”, from 2017, and “Fortuna” from 2022; They have had all kinds of awards. With the first, Díaz was a finalist for the Pulitzer and PEN/Faulkner Prizes and, for the second, he was included in the list of The New York Times and The Washington Post Best Books of the Year.
“Fortuna” is the title that the writer came to present at the Book Fair, in his first contact as an author with the Argentine public. “Trust” (such is the name of the novel in English) will soon be an HBO series, starring Kate Winsletwhich Diaz is currently working on.
What is this book so applauded around the world about? It is the story of a New York financier and takes place in the first decades of the last century. So successful is this businessman that the North American stock market dances to his rhythm and the famous crisis of 1929 is even attributed to him. Ultra-millionaire, he lives apart from the society of his time and his wife is the only love of his he. Mildred, such her name, is an elusive image from the beginning of the story, whose mystery will be revealed throughout the book. The novel is made up of four different texts, written by supposedly different authors, who tell conflicting versions of the personality, life and business of this rich couple.
The story crosses so many topics of interest (the fiction of money, the place of women in society, the shady past of fortunes, the relationship between art and philanthropy) that when you finish reading it, the scenes are still present in the readers’ imagination for a long time. The tone and the climates alternate poetic intensity with the cliché of laudatory memories. The structure has the rhythm of a dizzying literary game.
With a “strongly Buenos Aires” accent and a lot of humor, Hernán Díaz spoke with NOTICIAS, about his language, his novel and the singular importance of money.
NEWS: Why do you write in English? Have you ever written in Spanish?
Hernan Diaz: I wrote in Spanish when I was a kid. But since I started writing seriously, for the sake of publication, I do it in English. I have been living and working in English for 25 years.
NEWS: We can say that he started publishing his first books late. Most authors write them at age 20.
Díaz: I have those books, but no one published them for me. In the North American literary market there is a very strict protocol. You get a literary agent and that agent is the one who locates your work. But, in general, literary agents don’t take you if you don’t already have something published. But nobody publishes you if you don’t have a literary agent. It’s a sinister loop.
NEWS: Despite these difficulties, your books did very well. They were very successful.
Díaz: I write with the greatest precision, emotion and elegance of which I am capable. I want the books to do well and that is why I am very active in dissemination. But this is very limited. I think no one can do anything else. There is a conjunction of factors in success that I find difficult to explain.
NEWS: What are the things that matter to you in your literature?
Díaz: In general, I am interested in presenting very fossilized commonplaces and eroding them. Use the weight of these commonplaces to reverse them. I’m not interested in spontaneity. I think very few people can sit down and improvise and be amazing. I’m going to be obscene and quote myself in words that Mildred’s character writes in the novel: what interests me most in art is emotion and elegance. That is something that I look for as a reader, as a viewer and as a writer. And they are antithetical drives. Elegance has to do with control, with repression. The emotion is overwhelming, you can’t control it.
NEWS: Did you ask to read the Spanish translation of the play?
Diaz: Yes. In the languages I speak I look at the translation. Javier Calvo, the translator in the Anagrama edition, has a great career. It wouldn’t occur to me to radically change things in his work. I lowered the volume of the castizo a little.
NEWS: The book has four parts, which are four texts that are very different from each other. How did you achieve these differences in style?
Díaz: Without resorting to crude stylistic differences, I wanted them to be four very different sensibilities. That what attracts attention to the eye of one, is invisible to the eye of the other. For example, while writing, I noticed that all the characters used the same adverb clauses and the same punctuation. That trait was mine. It wasn’t theirs. So I had to create style guides for each character. The goal was for me to disappear.
NEWS: What was the initial idea for the book? What did you want to write about?
Diaz: The money. And then the book expanded into other issues. Two fundamental themes emerged from money. The first is the place of fiction in our lives and the evanescent line between fiction and reality. On the other hand, for me the question of gender became very important. Women have continued to be totally excluded from the world of capital. When I do presentations in the United States I often ask what year the first woman was admitted to the New York Stock Exchange. The year was 1975. That fact alone, isolated, is so eloquent about this absolutely deliberate segregation of half the population. If one thinks, as I do, that all political power is founded on material and economic power, it is not surprising how power has been divided. This became very central. I couldn’t write a book about money without writing about this exclusion. And that is also why the novel has this choral structure.
NEWS: In a book about money, one can also discover that money is the big story.
Díaz: Money is that fiction that permeates all levels of society. There isn’t much difference between real money and Monopoly money. The difference is the strength of the contract. How compelling is a fiction. To put it in crude and basic terms, money is a piece of paper and its purchasing power is fictitious and conventional, like a signifier for language. There is no material relationship with meaning. And if this fiction that is money conditions the way we live our lives and relate to others, by extension, it became necessary for me to think about the place of fiction in general for everyone.
NEWS: The novel is also a story about the life of the rich.
Díaz: Yes, and the protagonist is a rich man playing the character of a rich man. A fiction on top of another fiction, like superimposed tracing papers. What I tried to avoid is what happens in many novels that criticize the world of wealth. They start with this critical point of view, but end up entranced by the glamor of that world. This is what happens in the novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald. My great concern was not to fetishize the world of opulence.
NEWS: Weren’t these rich and powerful figures always loved by Americans?
Diaz: Not necessarily. They also get a very critical look. Not every millionaire is like a champion of capitalism and a heroic figure. There are characters like Henry Ford who are being questioned, for example, because of his anti-Semitism. Because behind every great fortune there is pain. A pain that wants to be covered, repressed and sanitized. The objective of each fortune is to present itself as something aseptic. The book talks about cleaning money. That is a fallacy, because slavery is behind many of those great fortunes.
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