By Lucas Cornejo Pásara
Translated by Patricio Ghezzi Novak
Hernán Díaz at the FIL Lima
Hernán Díaz, born in Buenos Aires and based in New York, won this year’s Pulitzer Prize with his second novel, Trust, originally written in English and published in Spanish by Anagrama. We spoke to him during his visit to the Lima International Book Fair (FIL Lima). Not surprisingly, the book was one of the best sellers at the fair. In its four segments, the novel explores the universe of stock market investments, the role of money in society, and the economic history around the 1929 Wall Street Crash. All of this around the figure of a tycoon.
Looking to get some fresh air, I go to Domeyer street, in Barranco, for a coffee. It’s FIL time, which means there’s a lot to read before the interviews. Self-absorbed, I don’t notice the three people who cross my way. One of them intervenes after two steps. It’s Guillermo Rivas, bookseller at Book Vivant, who is showing the author I’m about to greet around the city. “That guy has the book. He has my book,” he exclaims. And he’s not wrong: I’m carrying my copy of Trust with me —the brilliant book that has made the perhaps Argentine, perhaps New Yorker or perhaps Swedish author win the Pulitzer with only his second novel. His first, In The Distance, became a finalist. Surprised, I let him know that we’ll see each other tomorrow at his hotel.
“We’re old friends”, will explain Hernán Díaz the next day to the FIL representative who introduces us. We go to the terrace with Patricio Ghezzi Novak and Cayre Alfaro Fonseca. We’ve spent the night together and haven’t slept enough.
He’s a genius —says Hernán, after we tell him we’ve also been with Alejandro Zambra—. Really, in the full sense of the word. We’ve seen each other interruptedly because we live in different cities.
“Why do we trust certain voices and undermine others? Why do we believe that certain stories are more robustly anchored in referential reality and that others are exempt from having a relationship with the truth? The novel, in general, deals with this somewhat evanescent frontier. The territory of fiction, of history, of truth and myth.” Hernán Díaz explains one of the meanings behind his novel’s title.
You teach, right?
No, I have a weird job in Columbia, but trust me, it’s boring to explain.
Ok. Tell me, then, about the research process behind Trust. I imagine it involved getting into such an alien world, involving so much money.
Well, in the United States there’s a special concern about “research”. It seems a suspicious word to me. It’s nothing to do with you. It’s about the word when applied to literature. It’s a word that comes from the hard sciences, with a pretty strict, let’s say, epistemological, protocol. I think literature is a happier disorder. For me, what we could call research is only something that lets me imagine in a clearer way, with a better focus.
I knew it was very important that this novel, which is about an absurd level of wealth, didn’t fall into a frequent trap in novels that take place in this world. There are so many novels that supposedly critique this world of excess, but, reading them, one notices that the narrative voice is totally fascinated by that world. They end up fetishizing and aestheticizing the very object they pretended to critique.
If you notice, there are very few descriptions. It’s very austere and that’s very calculated. I didn’t want the actions to be an unconscious mode of glorifying a world that I find very problematic. I wanted the weight of wealth to be felt. For readers to live the experience of wealth’s gravitational force, but in another way, without describing mansions or yachts.
I work in many libraries. I mainly write in libraries. Because I’m an academic, I have training in archival work. I worked exclusively, except for two books, with primary sources: texts from the 1920s and 1930s. They ranged from financial magazines, fashion magazines, Senate chamber reports investigating the Crash, stock trading manuals…
How did you react to the novel having so much success in the financial world? It’s curious and particular because it’s a critique…
I think it’s particular too. It may have to do with the fact that no one ever thinks they’re the villains of a story. “It’s not me. It’s the others” —we laugh together—.
Yesterday we were discussing the title, which, in Spanish, is Fortuna, very different from Trust. I like them both, but they vary a lot…
I evidently feel an attachment to “Trust”, because that’s how the book was born. “Fortuna” was my suggestion. Javier Calvo made the translation. I tried to review some peninsular castizo aspects that, as a life long Latin American reader of Anagrama, I noticed. Apart from that, I only got involved in the title. I wanted one with a double semantic face. On the one hand, “Fortuna” means wealth, but, on the other, it’s destiny. “Trust” works in a way that is unfortunately lost in “Fortuna”, which is that the book, for its polyphonic and choral dimension, is a sort of invitation for readers to question the presuppositions and horizons of expectation with which we confront certain texts. Why do we trust certain voices and undermine others? Why do we believe that certain stories are more robustly anchored in referential reality and that others are exempt from having a relationship with the truth? The novel, in general, deals with this somewhat evanescent frontier. The territory of fiction, of history, of truth and myth.
And you, as a reader, when do you decide to trust a novel?
I’m precisely in that process now. I start writing in my head way before I write on paper. Besides, I actually write on paper. For example, I started to think about Trust while I was writing In The Distance. I started the book I’m writing now while I was thinking about writing Trust. I didn’t know which one to write first. It’s a terrifying moment. You must all know that feeling of saying: “this is shit, this isn’t gonna work, this is crazy, who can possibly be interested in this…” I find it useful to do a lot of reading in relation to what I’m writing. That organizes the project a little. I take extremely copious notes of my readings and ideas. After that, I write very bad initial scenes that only find their place later.
So, you write fragmentarily?
No. Only the start. One scene leads to an “I think it starts this way”. After that, I’m a very lineal writer: I go from beginning to end. In this case, it’s different because of the nature of the book. In The Distance was written in a vectorial and sequential way.
“It’s the incestuous genealogy of capital. Capital that engenders capital that engenders capital that engenders capital. That’s what interested me. A pecuniary, financial, monetary value, to use your word, totally divorced from any form of social value.” Hernán Díaz discusses the role of money in society and in his novel.
I’m interested in the difference between value and cost. For example, this book can cost twenty Euros, but for me its value is much more than that. Otherwise, I wouldn’t buy it. If a sandwich would cost the same, it wouldn’t be worth it… In the novel you talk about money as something abstract.
It’s a tough question. It has many questions within it. I’m not an economist, but what you said about the book’s value is something that Marx talks about in Das Kapital: the distinction he traces between exchange-value and use-value. Exchange-value is the value that a given commodity has in a market. It is generally related to supply and demand. That’s why this book can be worth twenty Euros while, really, considering production costs, it could be sold for fourteen. A certain demand makes it increase. Use-value is the material life that a given object has, independently of its exchange-value. The best way to understand the discrepancy between exchange-value and use-value is through luxury goods. This pen —he points to my pen— costs…
Three Soles…
We could buy one that is worth four thousand. The exchange-value is completely uneven between both prices, but the use-value is the same. So, when exchange-value exceeds use-value to such an exorbitant extent, we are dealing with what Marx calls “commodity fetishism”. Commodities seem to take a life of their own and are imbued with a mystical power. These are luxury goods. Marx talks about a dancing table. They gain a life of their own. They’re objects with which we have a relationship of hypercathexis, of desire, which, giving a step back, we realize no commodity should generate… This is directly related to the world of the novel. There’s a point in which the notion of value is so dissociated from material reality that it seems to have a life of its own. This is what happens in the finance world. One hears about these stock transactions in totally esoteric instruments, where the financial value generated has no correlation with any form of social value. That’s why characters in the novel have no interest in tangible commodities. Everything is totally abstract.
It’s making money with money
Exactly. It’s the incestuous genealogy of capital. Capital that engenders capital that engenders capital that engenders capital. That’s what interested me. A pecuniary, financial, monetary value, to use your word, totally divorced from any form of social value.
“I’m really interested in writing about things I don’t know about and learning by writing. With money, the more I learnt, the more I realized it was connected to fiction. Money as a fiction that rules our lives,” says Díaz.
Yeah. I’m very interested in that idea of money as a living being. Your character states that what he really liked about money was feeling it was alive.
Yeah. From Marx’s dancing table we can give a step back and say that here it’s not even about commodity fetishism. It’s about money fetishism. Throughout the book it’s clear that these characters aren’t interested in spending it. They’re interested in money for money’s sake. There’s a somewhat aestheticizing relationship with money.
I think it’s precise to say that the novel is about the role of money on society. I spent a season in Chicago and was shook by the link between American society and money. I felt the importance given to generating a lot and all the time, but at the same time a need to spend in ways unimaginable in Latin America. People my age (25) nonchalantly indebt themselves for thousands of dollars.
It’s true. I’d never thought of it that way, and I think you’re right. Generating debt is fundamental. The United State’s internal debt is huge. Part of the Wall Street Crash has to do with new forms of credit that didn’t exist. This conversation is more about finance than literature…
I can’t avoid asking how it was for you, coming from a literary and philosophical formation, to get so much into finance…
I think that my academic background helped me. If one takes academia more or less seriously, it’s about studying things one doesn’t know and tries to learn about. In that way, I’m really interested in writing about things I don’t know about and learning by writing. With money, the more I learnt, the more I realized it was connected to fiction. Money as a fiction that rules our lives.
Of course… hence the title…
Exactly, “Trust”. We have to trust in money. If we don’t, it doesn’t work. Every financial crisis starts because of that.
“But if we seriously talk about “art”, I think art has always been one of the few experiences, next to love, that always manages to escape money’s gravitational force and makes us live another way, outside that logic of exchange.”
That’s what is sadly lost in “Fortuna”. It seems that we don’t have much time left, but, going back to commodity fetishism, how do you see the artwork in relation to that?
I think those are two terms that bother me: work and art. But let’s use them for time’s sake.
I ask because it’s a whole thing now, with investments on digital art…
But that’s bullshit.
I agree.
It’s bullshit, it’s obscene, absurd… What happens with this type of thing, a Damien Hirst, or a Banksy, or a Basquiat (who I consider a genius, unlike the other two) artwork, which is sold for 150 million dollars, is that we go back to money instead of commodity fetishism. The aesthetic event becomes the price. I don’t know if you heard of Banksy’s artwork sold at Sotheby’s that disintegrated as soon as it was purchased, and everyone was like “oh, what a genius”… It got crushed because the artwork is the price, the money that has been spent on the artwork. I think that’s the “aesthetic” (between a thousand inverted commas) event. But if we seriously talk about “art”, I think art has always been one of the few experiences, next to love, that always manages to escape money’s gravitational force and makes us live another way, outside that logic of exchange.
Because it doesn’t have a utilitarian end?
Because it doesn’t have a utilitarian end. It’s an experience that cannot be exchanged for something else.
Lucas Cornejo Pásara, photo by Javier Zapata
Lucas Cornejo Pásara (Lima, Perú, 1997), after four career changes, studied Humanities with a mention in Latin American Studies in Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. In 2022, he published the short story collection Impresiones, his first book. Currently, he works as a cultural jorunalist and is preparing his first novel. He is part of a literary group called Etc. that doesn’t exist.
