![]() ![]() The term also has a literary bearing: Can we trust this tale? Is this narrator reliable? Diaz breaks the book into four sections, and the title of the first one is similarly ambiguous, echoing that of the whole work. Trust: both a moral quality and a financial arrangement, as though virtue and money were synonymous. That’s the hope anyway - or the fear, depending on whose side you’re on - and that’s the world Hernan Diaz explores in “Trust,” his intricate, cunning and consistently surprising second novel. The crime has been “forgotten, mind you, because it’s been properly handled,” the bodies neatly disposed of and the bank notes washed clean. Balzac puts those words in the mouth of a master criminal, and then adds a final twist. Of course, we also have to consider who’s speaking. Innovation? Maybe, but take a closer look at the human costs and natural resources needed to bring ideas to market. After all, what counts as an obvious explanation? The ownership of land? Balzac’s society might have thought so now we ask how that land was first acquired. ![]() ![]() “The secret of all great fortunes, when there’s no obvious explanation for them, is always some forgotten crime.” These words come from “Le Père Goriot” (1835), Honoré de Balzac’s great novel about the mysteries of Paris, and in English they’re most often quoted without the qualifying phrase in the middle. ![]()
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