Pulitzer Prize winner Hernan Diaz on the power of narratives and ‘beautiful’ Hong Kong

“I feel they are about to reclaim this space,” says the Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Hernan Diaz as he pauses along Battery Path in Hong Kong’s central business district to look at the tentacles of banyan trees gripping the walls like an intimate scaffolding. In the eyes of the New York-based writer, the contrast between lush vegetation and glass-and-steel monoliths illuminates the fragility of man-made symbols of power. “It is not entirely clear who is trespassing on whom.” Diaz is on a walk with the South China Morning Post ahead of his talks at the Hong Kong International Literary Festival, which ran from March 1-8. This was Diaz’s first visit to the city, and he absorbed the surroundings through the same high-contrast lens he employed in the 416-page Trust – one of Barack Obama’s favourite books of 2022, and the winner of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Set during the boom and bust of 1920s Wall Street, this forensic study of the accumulation of wealth and reputation is presented in four stylistically distinct and incompatible parts. The friction between the opposing narratives reveals an approximation of the truth. Truth is “polyphonic”, Diaz says, like the modern music promoted by the brilliant, forgotten wife of Andrew Bevel, a character in Trust whose own detachment, need to control and “cosmic” wealth make him an embodiment of today’s tech titans, or at least their public persona. Diaz is not a finance expert. His background as a literature scholar and fascination with the roles of stories led him to look into the workings of the global financial market, which, like all power structures, survives only because of narratives, he says. And that extends to money itself after the end of the gold standard. Strolling from St John’s Cathedral, a display of Hong Kong’s neo-Gothic heritage from the British colonial era, the “zealous, very committed atheist” takes in the Former French Mission Building, the Old Bank of China Building and Norman Foster’s HSBC Building, noting the universal truth of how money and power dictate what gets preserved. “Very often, we think about how power conditions certain narratives. But perhaps even more important is how dependent power is itself on narratives. There has never been a great political or financial power in the history of humankind that has not relied on storytelling to prop itself up. The stories can also be architectural,” he says, scanning the 180 years of monuments to power. As we approach the junction with Queen’s Road Central, one of just a handful of thoroughfares named after a woman, Diaz says that the invisibility of half of humankind is baked into global financial history. To discover the erased stories of women, he delved into the archives of America’s prominent families, where the wives’ papers are typically reduced to uncatalogued miscellany. He did not find anyone like Mildred Bevel, who was eventually revealed in Trust to be the brains behind her husband’s mythical Midas touch in the stock market. But meticulous research and a good dose of imagination led to the creation of three strong-willed female characters. Their stories are certainly more fascinating than Andrew Bevel’s heavily censored and incomplete biography – a stilted, tedious official story that Diaz likens to “a manspreading, loud, obnoxious voice”. By contrast, Mildred’s diary, written as she was dying of cancer and delirious with morphine, is a poetic and eloquent description of the “extreme, radical loneliness” of dying, Diaz says. Indeed, loneliness is a condition shared by all of the privileged characters in the book. “What I imagined was that surely, if you live that life [of extreme wealth], the world is fully open to you. But at the same time, I imagine that that level of wealth must also produce a sense of self-confinement, of paranoia, of withdrawal and reticence. It was this dissonance that first moved me to write the book,” he says. Hong Kong’s Central neighbourhood reflects his imaginings with its many elevated walkways. As we move from the Standard Chartered Bank Building to the Landmark in the sealed, air-conditioned bridges ferrying executives above the street’s noise and clamour, Diaz points out that the more removed a financial product is from the tangible world – from concrete commodities and goods and services – the more it affects reality. One can think of the collateralised debt obligations built on risky pools of US subprime mortgages that helped trigger the global financial crisis. Diaz also notices the monotony of globalisation from the walkway – every shop is an international luxury brand representative of the global sameness of capitalism. But he is enjoying himself in this ultra-capitalistic city, even though his description of 1920s Wall Street is richly detailed with acts of pure greed and manipulation and reads like a rebuke. “I am not immune to narratives,” he shrugs. “I’m very quickly falling in love with this city. It’s so beautiful and unexpected.” He waves off the label of a cynic. “Critique is vital. Literature thrives on critique, but cynicism implies a haughtiness, a grandstanding,” he says, calling himself an “optimistic” writer who is chasing the truth, no matter how unattainable. It is the author’s job, he believes, to imagine alternative, unlikely futures. If trust goes, money will collapse, which is what happens in his new novel, Ply, coming out in September. “It takes place some 400 years into the future. All currencies have failed, the state has failed, and there is no financial system in this world. So we have returned to bartering, which is very precarious but also very free. We have lost many things that are painful to lose, but also things that we shouldn’t have had in the first place,” he says. As we sip coffee by the Landmark’s fountain and warily eye a digital waterfall installation with loud, plastic floral arrangements nearby, Diaz promises that in his future there will be no fake flowers, just tree roots reclaiming space.

Pulitzer Prize winner Hernan Diaz on the power of narratives and ‘beautiful’ Hong Kong

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}‘Trust’ author Hernan Diaz talks about his lauded 1920s New York-set novel and architectural power symbols on his first visit to Hong Kong

‘Trust’ author Hernan Diaz talks about his lauded 1920s New York-set novel and architectural power symbols on his first visit to Hong Kong