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Hernan Diaz’s second novel, “Trust,” is four books in one. Our reviewer, Michael Gorra, calls it “complicated, cunning and consistently surprising.” It begins with a novel within the novel, about a man named Benjamin Rask, who builds and maintains a fortune in New York City as the 19th century gives way to the 20th. Diaz describes writing the uniquely structured book on this week’s podcast, and the ideas behind it.
“While wealth and money are so essential in the American narrative of itself as a nation, and occupy this almost transcendental place in our culture, I was quite surprised to find that few novels are about money itself,” says Diaz. . ‘Of course there are many novels that are about class – we were just talking about Henry James and Edith Wharton – or about exploitation or about excess and luxury and privilege. Many examples of that, but very few examples of novels about money and the process of amassing a great fortune.”
Paul Fischer visits the podcast to discuss “The Man Who Invented Motion Pictures,” which is about Louis Le Prince, who made what is now widely recognized as the first known film, as well as the story of his mysterious disappearance.
“What was fascinating about Le Prince—and what I loved so much as a film geek myself—is that he seems to have been the first of that generation to really have a vision of what the medium could be,” says Fischer. “There were a lot of people, like Thomas Edison or the Lumière brothers, who worked on moving images like a novelty toy. Their idea was that this can bring in a little bit of money, at least for a while, and then it will go away. And there were people, like Eadweard Muybridge or the French scientist Étienne-Jules Marey, who were scientists and really thought that moving images would be a way of explaining the way our bodies work, the way things move, the way nature works. to deconstruct. And Le Prince was really the first to write in his notebooks and talk to his family about this medium as something that would change the way we interacted with reality.”
Also in this week’s episode, Gregory Cowles and Elisabeth Egan talk about what they’ve read. John Williams is the landlord.
Here are the books discussed in this week’s “What We Read”:
We’d love to hear what you think about this episode, and about the Book Review podcast in general. You can send them to books.†
