The novel Trust by Hernan Diaz is gaining ground worldwide. You can experience him in Lillehammer this spring.
Hernan Diaz was born in Argentina and grew up in Sweden, but he has spent most of his life in the United States. And it is precisely American history that is the starting point for the novel Trust. The novel was recently translated into Norwegian by Bjørn Alex Herman. The stock market crash of 1929, what led up to it and all that it brought with it. But equally, Trust is a novel about power and money and a cunning pageturner that draws the reader on a journey through the 20th century, in an increasingly obsessive attempt to separate lies from facts.
Diaz was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for his debut novel In the Distance (2017) and in 2022 he was nominated for the Man Booker Prize for Trust. The book has received jubilant reviews. Marta Norheim in NRK writes that this is “The novel that has everything. Trust strikes precisely at the point where psychology and finance intersect. The result is dizzying”. Dagens Næringsliv’s critic Varg Lukas Folkman writes that the book is “particularly difficult to put down. Hernan Diaz paints a brilliant portrait of a marriage, seen from four different perspectives. (…) Novels with such a playful attitude to form, which are at the same time as accessible as Trust, are rare.”
“Getting Hernan Diaz to the festival is pure happiness,” says artistic advisor Yukiko Duke, and continues: “In his latest work Trust, he shows how many dimensions a novel can contain. It can be both a complex human drama, a tremendous economic thriller and at the same time a philosophical reflection on the deception of memory”.