Finally, unearthed from the archives decades later, is Mildred’s unknown and unvarnished private diary. He was born in Argentina his family moved to Stockholm when he was two, and he grew up with Swedish as his first language, then relocated to Argentina when he was nine. A third section is recounted by the ghostwriter of Bevel’s memoirs, Ida Partenza. When his first novel, In the Distance, was published, Hernán Diaz described the sense of foreignness he gained from his formative years. This is followed by Bevel’s uncompleted autobiography, a self-congratulatory account designed to restore his reputation and rebut the calumnies about his wife, Mildred, who actually died of cancer. The first of the book’s four sections takes the form of a popular novella based on Bevel’s life, depicting the financier as an emotionally repressed numbers savant who drove his wife to madness and an agonizing death in a Swiss sanatorium. For Trust always acknowledges the world that lies outside its own pages. Diaz’s method is to juxtapose competing interpretations of the life of his character Andrew Bevel, whose sensational career reached its zenith when he successfully shorted the 1929 crash, gaining hundreds of millions of dollars as well as the enmity of the public. “Trust” is a rich and prismatic-though ultimately anticlimactic-novel interested in the twin meanings of speculation, both the act of amassing wealth through the stock market and of creating stories to explain and define the past.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |