When did we hear about Hernán Díaz? The timing is precise: last May, when the world‘s media announced that his novel “Fortuna” had won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature. Perhaps a little earlier, in July of last year, when international media reported that “Fortuna” was going to be adapted into a miniseries by HBO Max and starring Kate Winslet.
First as an announcement of a future streaming project, but definitely with the Pulitzer announcement it was that We found out in Argentina about Hernán Díaz. Of course, by the time this happened (to us), Hernán Díaz had been one of the most prominent figures in United States Literature, where he has lived for 25 years.
Author of “Borges, between history and eternity» (Borges between History and Eternity), a critical essay in which he studies Borges’ relationship with the United States and “In the distance” (In the Distance) (2017) with which he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and PEN/Faulkner, last year he released “Fortuna” (Trust), which was included in their lists of the ten best books of that year by The Washington Post and The New York Times newspapers, and with which this time he did win the Pulitzer for Fiction in May of this year. Since then, her life has changed.
“I am still very disoriented, all the reference points have moved and although it is very celebratory, it has been a lot of work, but happy work,” acknowledged the author during a press conference organized by Anagrama -the publishing house that translated it into Spanish and published it in Argentina- of which he was part BLACK RIVER Journalalong with media from Argentina and Mexico.
“Everything changed drastically. I would say that I have always been in the world of books, of literature and, recently, when they began to publish me -which was very late in my life- I was always aware of what this award meant. But until last month I had not been clear about the presence it has in North American society.. The recognition has been very strong. And yes, it had an impact on the press, sales, recognition on the street, it’s very crazy.
Born in Buenos Aires in 1973, Hernán Díaz emigrated with his family to Sweden after the 1976 military coup. He returned to the country to study Letters in the UBA. After staying here for 14 years, settled in the United States. There he forged a reputation in the academic world and decided to write in English although when speaking he maintained an unmistakable Buenos Aires accent. He is currently one of the most interesting authors of American narrative.
“Fortuna”, a novel about money
“Fortuna” explores the ins and outs of American capitalism, the power of money, the passions and betrayals that drive personal relationships, and the ambition that ruins everything. Regarding the origin of “Fortuna”, Díaz recounted: “The project was born as a novel about money, about that dissonance that I imagined between total access to all goods and, at the same time, isolation, confinement, a kind of paranoia also in those who own those fortunes. That kind of disconnect between access and loneliness was the beginning of the novel”.
Somehow, I hope this quietly experimental novel succeeds in reclaiming fiction’s place in the world.”
“Fortuna” approaches money in an original way which, the author acknowledged, surprised him: “Very quickly I discovered to my surprise that, in American literature, which is the one with which I am most in conversation, there were no novels about the process of capital accumulation. There are many about epiphenomena that revolve around money, mainly questions of class, eccentricities of the wealthy and oppression of the subordinates, but the access to capital itself, the gears of capital accumulation is something that is not discussed in the literature. Money is kind of a big taboo, something that’s not particularly talked about in the US. There’s a sanctimoniousness around money that I think has to do with a puritanical tradition.”
This absence of literature about the origins of fortunes motivated Hernán Díaz from the literary point of view: “I like to find blind spots in certain canons and traditions and in no way do I want to say that I am here to fill those gaps, what I want to say is that the existence of those gaps is productive for me. I think that money, or rather the accumulation of money, in literature is one of those holes.
The absence of women in the epic of capital
Another thing that he verified when working on the subject was the total and absolute absence of women in the epic of capital, an issue that became central to him: “A deliberate exclusion”, he emphasized. “Let’s think that the first woman to be accepted on the New York Stock Exchange was in 1975,” he stressed emphatically. “This speaks very eloquently about the intention of this segregation, I think this is the word.”
Money is kind of a big taboo, something that’s not particularly talked about in the US. There’s a sanctimoniousness around money that I think has to do with a puritanical tradition.”
Taken to the narrative structure, for Hernán Díaz the question of the voice became very important when thinking about who was given a megaphone in the story and who has been gagged. “So, instead of merely thematizing the voice around these great epics of capital that coincide with the epics of the constitution of the nation, I found it more interesting to invite people to experience what it means to have contact with these voices or to have the experience of the marginalization of those voices. For this reason, the most important voice in the novel is objectively buried under these narrative tectonic layers and the work of the readers is in this novel an archaeological work to reach this voice”.
Money, literature and fiction
Another aspect that interested Hernán Díaz in working on his latest award-winning novel was the structural relationship between money and fiction. “The operation of both is based on trust, on belief,” he said. “We have to believe in the story we are reading. Without that basic contract in belief about what we are reading, no matter how delirious the story may be, because if we don’t believe it falls apart, we lose interest, we abandon reading. Something similar happens with money: we have to believe that this bill, which has no material relationship with its purchasing power, is real, it works within a legitimate system. If that belief is cracked, the financial system also collapses, the currency, the stock market, the credit system, or however money manifests itself in the same way that a story collapses. If we accept this premise that money has the structure of fiction, it becomes evident how important are fictions in our lives. The only thing that differentiates the money from a board game like Monopoly from the money in our wallets is precisely that we believe in these fictions. This means that fiction does have a tangible impact on our lives.”
In this sense, he deepened by saying: “What interested me with this novel was to rethink what was the place of fiction in our daily life, because I think that fiction is relegated to a kind of discursive accessory that could or could not be there. being, is a harmless pastime. And I believe that fiction, for better or for worse, can leave a mark on reality. Each one of us is the sum of the stories we tell about ourselves and that others tell about us. Some of these are fictitious, but they are still relevant in the constitution of our own subjectivity and in the way we interact in the world. Stories and narrative are the most essential technologies that we humans have to apprehend the world and find meaning in our experience of the world. Somehow, I hope this quietly experimental novel succeeds in reclaiming fiction’s place in the world.”
If we accept this premise that money has the structure of fiction, it becomes clear how important fictions are in our lives.
About his novel production work and how he immerses himself in the chosen theme, in this case money and the origin of a capital, BLACK RIVER Journal asked when you feel like you finally have a story to tell “For me, that whole moment is utter chaos. in which I do not know very well what I am doing, ”he acknowledged. “For this, Nabokov has the image of a bird that begins to collect twigs, stones, and suddenly finds a nest. I feel that my work is similar to that Nabokov bird: I have a pile of notes, books that look like a pile of garbage (laughs) and there is a silent work, I don’t really know what happens, I need to have a certain degree of saturation and that that garbage pile as big as possible so that at a certain point I can’t explain, I wish I knew! everything fits and works smoothly. My answer, ultimately, is prayer. Finally, when I start to write I think the work itself with the syntax of ending with one sentence and continuing with the next and face the materiality of language and everything stops being a Platonic thing that can be fitted together in infinite ways to find that sentence that gives order to all that. There is something in the language itself that governs the way».
Who is Hernan Diaz?
Born in Buenos Aires in 1973, Hernán Díaz migrated with his family to Sweden after the coup d’état in Argentina in 1976. Upon the return of democracy he returned to Argentina, where he studied Literature at the University of Buenos Aires. He subsequently obtained a fellowship at King’s College London and completed his PhD at New York University. He resides in the United States, where he teaches at Columbia University,
An English-language writer, in 2012 he published his first book, “Borges, entre la historia y la eternidad” (Borges between History and Eternity), a critical essay in which he studies Borges’s relationship with the United States. His first novel “In the Distance” (2017) was a finalist for the Pulitzer and PEN/Faulkner prizes and in 2022, he published Fortuna (Trust), which was included in his lists of the ten best books of that year. by The Washington Post and The New York Times, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (2023), and which will be adapted as a series by the HBO chain and with Kate Winslet as the protagonist and executive producer and in which Díaz also collaborates as producer .