Hernan Diaz, Trust

 

- Has there ever been a novel focused on the finance industry, the major family dynasties in the US who invented and controlled it, and the ways they shaped the 20th century? This is one and it’s magnificent. A stunningly good and enjoyable read which made the Booker Prize longlist for 2022. 

- The novel is in four parts - a fictional novella written by a Harold Vanner, a controversial portrayal of an influential investor and his wife which sold in a huge numbers, and three memoirs, all seemingly addressing the realities. What, we ask, are the facts? Who can we trust? 

- The key players are Andrew Bevel and his wife Mildred. It's the early 1900s leading up to the start of the depression in 1929.

- In smooth, crystal clear prose Harold Vanner's novella tells the story of Benjamin Rask who sells the tobacco empire built by his forebears, particularly his father Solomon, and buys into the financial industry. He becomes a huge success.

- He successfully navigates the 1920 recession, then the bull market of the 1920s, then the crash of October 1929. The bubble became a slump, then a panic. ‘In the general desolation, amidst the rubble, Rask was the only man standing…He had shorted, quite spectacularly, the ensuing crash’. He became a scapegoat, the popular press blaming him for the economic disaster. He made some badly wrong decisions later in the decade and faded from public view.

- The second part of Diaz's novel gives us a draft memoir titled My Life, by an Andrew Bevel, a highly influential financial player in New York who accuses Harold Vanner of basing his novel on him and his wife Mildred. He is determined to demolish the novel's 'libellous trash'. 

- His draft memoir demonstrates what an insufferable, self-entitled prick he actually is. His great grandfather William ‘was an innovator and a visionary…His experiments with currencies, with futures contracts, with treasury notes…show his pioneering spirit’. Andrew is continuing that noble tradition. ‘I’m essential to society and its economy’ he claims. ‘Personal gain ought to be a public asset’. He smugly narrates his ‘success’ in saving and building the nation’s economy in the 1920s...'Nothing to do with the government...My actions safeguarded American industry and business'. 

- He describes the phenomenal post World War 1 economic growth - electricity, motor cars and trucks, highways, home appliances, etc. ‘But the greatest American industry at that time was finance’. 

- He is excruciatingly sexist. Women just 'interfere' if they’re not busy with housework. And he hates the 'interfering' Federal Reserve. 

- Mildred, however, his wife, is really a fascinating character. She is a philanthropist and a very generous patron of the arts, particularly New York orchestras and musicians. She enabled the birth of the Juilliard Graduate School. She actually detests her husband's primitive, ugly views, and they never talk when home, only at public events. 

- The most fascinating memoir is by a young woman Ida Partenza, who is hired by Bevel to transcribe, edit and type his memoir. She is a creative ghostwriter. She visits Bevel House regularly for this purpose. Her father is an Italian immigrant and a radical anarchist, opposite in every way to the New York elite establishment his daughter now works for. They argue a lot, and it's delightful. Fascism is building in Europe and capitalism is raging out of control in America.   

- She delves into Mildred’s diaries to explore her social life in detail. Mildred welcomes many famous composers and musicians to the mansion, including Ravel, Stravinski and Respighi. She generously funded contemporary composers, whom she preferred, and hosted concerts. Bevel hated these ‘untraditional’ performances that ‘barely sounded like music’. Ida however uncovers a far more sophisticated woman, not the childlike, homey, invention of her husband. Mildred also becomes interested in politics and current affairs. This is quite different from Vanner’s version of her as the quiet aesthete slowly going insane. ‘Why make her mad when she was obviously so lucid?, Ida reflects. 

- Any decent husband would be impressed by his wife’s gifts and achievements, but not Bevel, this cold money obsessed knob. Thankfully he dies soon after of a heart attack.

- The fourth part of the novel is titled Futures. It's Mildred's journal, one she kept as a patient in an institution caring for cancer sufferers. Ida discovers it in the New York Public Library 50 years later. 

- What becomes clear, and is absolutely revelatory given the creative fictions we've been fed so far, is that she was very much involved in her husband's financial decisions. She was a 'mathematical genius'. They were a partnership. ‘He taught me the rules of investment. I showed him how to think beyond their boundaries….Andrew followed my instructions. Our profits during those years dwarfed the original Bevel fortune’. At one point she whimsically suggested bribing one of the keyboard operators at the stock exchange to provide all the quotes before punching them into the ticker machine thus making them public. They would have ten seconds at least to buy or sell. He acted on that advice and made huge gains. She was appalled and labeled him a criminal.

- She had an extraordinary gift of correctly predicting market trends. In September 1929, for instance, one month before the great crash, she and her husband liquidated and made a fortune.

- So Diaz has given us a novella of fiction and three books of memoir, all in various ways undermining each other. Mildred however emerges as the reliable narrator, and Ida the honest biographer. They are the voices we learn to trust. 

- Females, finance, a century ago. Who would have thought!

Jock Serong, The Settlement

 

- The Settlement is Jock Serong's final novel in his magnificent trilogy about our early colonial invaders and their brutal treatment of Australia's Indigenous peoples. The two previous novels were Preservation (2018) and The Burning Island (2020).

- The three novels are stand alone and each can be fully comprehended without having read the others (despite there being one character who appears in different guises in each of the novels - he's an embodiment of sheer evil).   

- The Settlement demands to be read slowly and carefully. Serong's rich prose is full of intricate observation. He renders the horror of colonialism in vivid detail.

- The central character is The Man, who we later in the novel learn is the Commandant of the Tasmanian colony in the 1830s. He's a committed christian: We - Englishmen - pursue a duty to bring light to darkness. Civilisation...Here are the savages you once feared, stripped of their terrors and set to become Christians. His mission, under London's orders, is to rid Van Diemen's Land of its natives by removing them to a small island to the north. His preference is to negotiate with them and pursue a peaceful accommodation. A rebel band of natives called the Big River Mob have taken a different approach. They are determined to fight the settlers and take back their land, and not indulge in peaceful, cumbersome negotiation.  

- The names of the Indigenous leaders are long and barely pronounceable, but we gradually get familiar with them: Mannalargenna, the chief leader, and his sister Toogernuppertootener are key players. 'Tooger-Nupper-Tootener', as she spells it out to a white, is plain-speaking and bold and refuses to be cowed by the British. She is delightful. 

- Two key characters are Whelk, the Indigenous orphan boy who yearns to know his origins, and the little girl Pipi, also an orphan. 

- Before the trek north begins we're introduced to a huge dark man who had eyes only for the children. He has an old injury to his nose, and a scar across his brow. The eye under the scar does not move. He will be their catechist. (The previous two novels featured this malignant, evil character). He turns out to be a vicious child abuser, and runs the orphanage. Pipi is beaten savagely and dies. The Commandant does nothing about it. If he raised the alarm about (the Catechist) and his evil ways, he would destroy the careful impression he had built of an orderly, pious settlement. He would scuttle any chance of the Port Phillip assignment.

- However he is upset his request to the Colonial Office for recompense for what he has achieved in Van Diemen’s land (emptying it of natives) was not granted; My contribution to clearing these people off the settled lands has never been properly recognised. 

- Mannalargenna is ill and dying. The Commandant is determined to acquire anatomical  specimens of the natives. The numbers could not be denied: these poor innocents were headed for extinction, and when they were gone, future generations would ask: who strove to collect evidence of these lost tribes? They would look for a name to attach to compendia, to halls of learning. A name to etch in marble. His name...He must have the head. The greatest of the Tasmanian chiefs, emblematic of a dying race: it had fallen to him alone to preserve this vital piece of evidence in anatomy’s long journey to understanding. 

- Mannalargenna has wised up: You told me we safe. We not safe.
Told me we get land. Got no land...An I don’t need your Jesus, Englishman…Doan need your gospel.

- Serong includes other highly dramatic incidents in the novel, which are very satisfying, and in the Afterword tells the history of the settlement and of George Augustus Robinson the Commandant. The graves of Mannalargenna and others were rendered invisible during the twentieth century, trampled by cattle. The ruins of the settlement still mark the grasses of Pea Jacket Point today.

(The Saturday Paper (September 17-23, 2022) includes a very enlightening discussion between Neha Kale and art historian Greg Lehman on the painting The Conciliation by Benjamin Duterrau who emigrated to Van Diemen's Land in the 1830s. The painting depicts Robinson meeting with a group of First Nations people known as the Big River Mob. Lehman's dissection of the painting is highly informative. A must read.)  

Peter Papathanasiou, The Invisible

 

- This new novel from Greek-Australian author Peter Papathanasiou, author of the excellent outback noir thriller The Stoning, sits more comfortably in the political/historical genre than the crime category. It has a lot more richness and meaning than your standard thriller. And the reader is seriously enlightened, especially those of us not that aware of modern Greece and it’s pretty ugly 20th century history.

- Like any good thriller it fleshes out the life of a city, town or village, pulsating with realism and detailing the full locale, not just the underbelly. The village here is Glikinero in the northern region of Greece which borders Albania and North Macedonia. It's located on the shore of the Great Prespa lake. (The book's frontispiece provides a good map of the region). It also brings alive Greece’s natural world, its animals, birds and floral delights, and the wonderful food the friendly, delightful inhabitants eat. The author celebrates…a country blessed with immense natural beauty and warm, generous people, but with poor prospects for growth and prosperity. It’s an ode to Greece in so many ways, and doesn't shy away from criticism of Australia when appropriate. 

- The very likeable Detective Sargeant George Manolis, who featured in The Stoning, shoots and kills a homeless boy by accident in Melbourne, so he’s forced to take time off and chooses to travel to Greece for a holiday. His parents migrated to Australia after World War II.

- His old friend Lefty (Lefteris) is missing. He's a very popular man in the village, or so it seems. As the novel progresses we learn there's more to him than meets the eye. He's a cross-border smuggler of all sorts of merchandise, including drugs, and a scheming con man with no moral compass - ‘borrowing’ money but never giving it back. 

- Manolis never discloses that he's a detective, well experienced in tracking down missing criminals. But he's determined to find Lefty, dead or alive. 

- We're introduced to quite a few characters living in the village. They're generous to Manolis  but some of them have secrets and grudges going back generations. Greece, Albania and North Macedonia just don’t get on. They fought one another during the war, which was then followed by the horrific Greek civil war of 1946-49. Ancient European animosities can never be forgotten. Many children, including the disabled, were victims. We're immersed in a village of prehistoric, lowlife, Nazi sympathisers.…the strange world of the Prespes, a world of black-market smugglers and illegal immigrants and Romani who claimed the land was cursed. 

- One peculiar tradition of the region was the frequent and secret adoption of masculinity by women who would otherwise be passed over for family inheritance. They voluntarily became 'sworn virgins'. 

- This bewildering social cocktail baffles Manolis on many levels as it does the reader. Nevertheless the resolution of Lefty's mysterious disappearance at the end, just as Manolis is about to depart for Australia, is very satisfying.

- If you're a crime genre addict and looking for a straight up and down thriller, even in today's sophisticated Australian noir tradition, you may not relish this book, but you will learn a lot from it and it will stay with you. And you will plan a holiday to Greece.  

Oliver Mol, Train Lord

This is not an essay or a book review. Thus is a love story. I fell in love with writing, and then I stopped. I’m trying to figure out what happened, and whether I can fall in love again. 

- Oliver Lol has written an extraordinary piece of work, a beautifully written bio/essay in which he totally opens himself to the reader. He ranges widely across all sorts of topics: girlfriends, drugs, sex, pain, hope, work and love, creating a rich tapestry of life’s deepest challenges, and the simple everyday stuff that binds it all together. At its heart is always love, for his parents, his wider family, and his friends. His deep relationship with Maria and its sad ending is central. 

- The book is so moving and profound and its radical honesty is breathtaking. He describes the awful pain of his chronic migraines and headaches, jaw pain and back pain. He was utterly unable to write, read, or even look at a screen for months at a time. He couldn't even fill in a form or write his own name.

- He lands a job as a train driver/guard on the Sydney rail network and it grounds him in the everyday. He particularly enjoys the blokey conversations with his workmates, and the ability to occasionally sprinkle his announcements to passengers with a delightful comic touch. 

In the beginning I resisted, but later I grew to love the repetitive rituals that became everyday life: swiping in, filling out the timesheets, blowing whistles, making announcements, opening and closing doors, waking at two or three or four in the morning, watching the sun come up over Waterfall, Penrith or Hornsby. It was, at the right hours and in certain lights, romantic, the way writing or literature or movies or the fictions inside my head had once promised to be. 

… if you’re really listening, the trains will tell their own stories. They’ll tell you about a boy who had a migraine and how he nearly took his life once, but then they’ll say: that’s nothing special - look at us all together; there are millions of people, and they’re all just like you.

  

- He visited many doctors, specialists, psychologists and 'healers', but none of them were of any use. Until he found one at the end who really understood. He needed to embrace the power of forgiveness, of others and himself. The body and the spirit connect. They are one. 

...because sometimes from the wreckage the wounded crawl, they stand up, they sing.

- Mol's prose is so entrancing that I could quote so many passages. Instead buy this book and read and re-read it. It will become a classic in the genre.