Book Review: TRUST - A novel
By Hernan Diaz. Here on Amazon.
Recommendation: Great fiction read. I don’t read much fiction, but when I do it’s usually finance-fiction. Often fiction can be more truthful in its quips. It should, IMHO, be easier to read. I like to read fiction to build momentum for a more difficult read or arduous task. The sense of completion in adding another book to the pile is so sweet.
What is Trust about? Here is a description from the publisher. These people are professionals, so I’m going to quote them:
Even through the roar and effervescence of the 1920s, everyone in New York has heard of Benjamin and Helen Rask. He is a legendary Wall Street tycoon; she is the daughter of eccentric aristocrats. Together, they have risen to the very top of a world of seemingly endless wealth—all as a decade of excess and speculation draws to an end. But at what cost have they acquired their immense fortune? This is the mystery at the center of Bonds, a successful 1937 novel that all of New York seems to have read. Yet there are other versions of this tale of privilege and deceit.
At once an immersive story and a brilliant literary puzzle, TRUST engages the reader in a quest for the truth while confronting the deceptions that often live at the heart of personal relationships, the reality-warping force of capital, and the ease with which power can manipulate facts.
What was great about it? It weaved together a few complex points that only fully came together at the end and were revealed elegantly. Second, it had some beautiful depictions of generalizable thinking.
Below are my favorite quotes with my commentary after.
No enterprise can fully succeed without a true understanding of human behavior.
Human behavior and human needs.
Every financier ought to be a polymath because finance is the thread that runs through every aspect of life. It is indeed the knot where all the disparate strands of human existence come together.
Human behavior and human needs, again. Systems of human incentives. Common theme.
People who had never even seen a ticker before 1924 became financial experts overnight. It never seemed so easy to “get rich.” No one was concerned that this reckless gambling undermined the foundations of our hard-earned prosperity. Trading became America’s favorite indoor sport.
Remind you of any recent period in America? ;)
The closer one is to a source of power, the quieter it gets. Authority and money surround themselves with silence, and one can measure the reach of someone’s influence by the thickness of the hush enveloping them.
Masterful description.
Why work at a place that makes one thing when I could work at a company that makes all the things? Because that’s what money is: all things. Or at least it can become all things. It’s the universal commodity by which we measure all other commodities.
Uttered in a job interview. “All the things.”
My job is about being right. Always. If I’m ever wrong, I must make use of all my means and resources to bend and align reality according to my mistake so that it ceases to be a mistake.
Spoken by the financier patriarch.
A fortune seldom has one single owner. Many interests and parties are tied to it. Rather than a block of granite, wealth resembles a river basin with multiple tributaries and branches.
God is the most uninteresting answer to the most interesting questions.
Journal entry on a deathbed. Still a great line.
I’ve come to think one is truly married only when one is more committed to one’s vows than the person they refer to.
From someone in a not-great marriage.
Most of us prefer to believe we are the active subjects of our victories but only the passive objects of our defeats. We triumph but it is not really we who fail — we are ruined by forces beyond our control.