In the United States, the mere word 'social' produces terror: Hernan Diaz, Argentine writer who won the Pulitz

Hernan Diaz wanted to narrate from fiction the “mysterious gears that govern the life of capital” on Wall Street.

For this, after reviewing the great classics of economic theory and United States history, he decided to create in his novel Trust the universe that surrounds Benjamin Rask, a magnate who in the early 1920s multiplies the inheritance he receives from his family betting on financial capital.

Born in Argentina in 1973, Diaz grew up in Sweden, studied Literature at the University of Buenos Aires and received a PhD in Philosophy from New York University. He has lived in the United States for 25 years.

Trust (Riverhead Books, 2022), translated into Spanish as “Fortuna” (Anagrama, 2023), was included in Barack Obama 's list of favorite books, it comes five years after his first novel “A lo lejo” and has just won the Pulitzer Prize in the Fiction category.

From a hotel in Los Angeles, where he is holding meetings for the adaptation of his book to an HBO series that will star Kate Winslet, Diaz talks to BBC Mundo about capitalism in the United States, the inequalities, alliances and betrayals that orbit in the world of money

From the beginning, the novel has been thought of as a story about capital, about great fortunes and the process of accumulating these great fortunes. In that sense, it is a deeply political issue.

Although I am not interested in making a literature of denunciation -it is not the type of books I read or the ones I want to write-, in this work there is a concern for the inequality inherent to the system in which we live and a curiosity about these mysterious gears that govern the life of capital.

But the subject is always relevant, even if it was published in 1963, 1980, or 1991.

Is Trust a novel about great fortunes but also about the debate around the truth?

Yes, it's not just about capital. This novel also talks about the systematic and organized form of misogyny, the deliberate exclusion, the distortion of the truth created by power, the way in which certain narratives shape our lives and the blurred border between fiction and reality.

At what point did you decide that you were going to write a novel about money?

It has not been a precise moment, but a little vague, as things tend to be for me.

What interested me is a kind of dissonance, which was very striking for me, between what I imagined comes with immense fortune, I mean total access to certain experiences, people and places, and the feeling of utter isolation, of paranoia. and confinement.

That disagreement between total access and isolation was the beginning of this novel. It was there that I said: there is something.

Although it is not a denunciation book, you have a critical look on the subject .

Obviously I was interested in the political dimension of the subject, which was risky, because the last thing I wanted to do when writing a critical novel about these fabulous riches was to end up dazzled by the very object that I was trying to question.

Therefore, I entered that world with great caution and with a certain degree of fear.

And he opted for the financial world instead of the productive one…

It interested me that this immense fortune was totally divorced from any production of material goods, of tangible merchandise, of concrete services. In the novel it is money that begets money, that is what interested me, that disparity between social value and economic value.

Could you explain that?

The best paid people in the world are those who contribute the least materially to the economy. And I'm not saying that finances are irrelevant. Not at all, I think they can be a very important force to create jobs, improve our quality of life. That is, it can be a force for good. Not all financial activities are mere speculation. But there is a disproportion in what these people earn compared to the rest of the population.

The United States, the richest country in the world, has some of the worst poverty rates among developed nations. Why is that?

The answer is very simple. It has to do with an absolutely mystical conception of the free market, a religious reading of Adam Smith, which resurfaces in the 1980s with Milton Friedman and the Chicago School.

The ideas that defend non-intervention in a radical way established that the markets are never wrong, that the good of corporations and shareholders necessarily redounds to the good of society and that if the rich do well, society in general it will be good for you too. The idea that wealth will overflow.

A view questioned by many other economists...

There are numerous Nobel laureates who have statistically proven these premises to be false.

The ideas that regulation is not necessary, that the good of shareholders coincides with the good of the population in general because the rich, the richer they are, the more they benefit society, ultimately translate into specific tax policies: tax cuts, cuts in infrastructure works, education.

And this creates a tremendous vicious circle. For example, you go into debt to study or to get a tooth pulled, and that's how these numbers are fed. Poverty is a crazy and unjustifiable nightmare for a society as rich and powerful as the American one.

What role do immigrants play in building great fortunes in the United States?

Immigrants are a fundamental part of the novel. Since the first page I talk about them completely intentionally. I present this powerful man of the American nobility, not as a person of blue blood, but as an immigrant.

In the United States we are all immigrants, unless you are a native of these lands, who, as in Latin America, have been exterminated, excluded and marginalized.

Unless one belongs to those communities, we are all immigrants, beginning with the first Puritan settlements. The novel speaks very explicitly about how these different migratory currents exercise the same discrimination against the new communities that they suffered.

In his novel he says, in the voice of one of his narrators, that in general we prefer to believe that we are active subjects of our victories but only passive objects of our defeats. Can we apply this idea to the way big banks operate when asking for bailouts ?

Yes, totally. We are all against state intervention until a tragedy happens. It's as if these disasters were almost meteorological: I can't do anything about it.

Now, if I'm doing well, it's because I'm brilliant, it's my responsibility. Large operations that generate large profit margins are seen by banks as if the responsibility rests with them alone, but if things go wrong, it is an act of god, a tragedy.

In his novel appears the millionaire who takes risks in glassy moments thanks to privileged access to information. 

What place does information have in the construction of these fortunes ?

At the center of the novel's financial intrigue is exclusive and early access to information. In turn, how to create time lines based on the information that is available. This is important in the novel.

There are various specular motifs, which are inverted and reversed, there are scenes that are repeated at different times, that is, there are all these games with time, which are also a kind of reflection of the games with time that occur in the finance.

Why do you think that there is no strong left in the United States ?

In part, because in the first decades of the 20th century there was a brutal repression of these groups where the Italians played a central role, something that appears in the novel. Many of them were socialists, communists, anarchists, trade unionists. All these attempts at labor organization ended up being crushed in a very bloody way. There are many examples of that throughout history.

Can you identify other elements?

It may also have to do with a very strong crossover between religion and politics, especially from the 1950s onwards, which reemerged strongly in the 1980s with evangelicalism.

The Cold War was always in the background, at a time when the Soviet Union was seen, not merely as a rival, but as an existential danger to the United States. So any association with anything tangentially related to communism was seen as treason. That is something that radically marked the political spectrum in this country.

In the United States the mere word “social” produces terror.