Barack Obama Posts

Hernan Diaz “Trust”

[I wrote this post on Facebook on 4 July 2022]

Hernan Diaz’s novel Trust is being discussed a lot these days especially since Kate Winslet has optioned it for HBO as a limited series on TV. Both, author and actress, will be co-producers of the show. It should be good if past experience of Kate Winslet’s award-winning “Mare of Easttown” is anything to go by. “Trust” too is equally complex in its narratives. The adaptation will be gruelling as it will require a single narrative with disruptions in the telling to create the same effect that reading the book has.

The book is in four parts. A bestselling novella called “Bonds” by Harold Vanner. It is the fictionalised account of legendary 1920s Wall Street tycoon and his wife, Benjamin and Helen Rask. She is the daughter of eccentric aristorcrats who are down and out on their luck. Marrying Rask, Helen zooms to the top of the New York social ladder, much to the delight of her ambitious mother. The story continues about the obscenely wealthy and childless couple becoming patrons of the Arts but remaining more or less to themselves. The love story ends with the declining health and demise of Helen Rask in a sanatorium in Switzerland. “Bonds” is followed by personal accounts of the real tycoon, Andrew Bevel (“My Life”), his secretary Ida Partenza (“A Memoir, Remembered”) and extracts from Mildred Bevel’s diaries ( “Futures”).

It is an astonishing feat on the part of Hernan Diaz in writing in these four distinctive voices. Beginning with the novella where the literary craftsmanship is sublime. The elegant prose is like a nineteenth century novel in a twenty-first century garb. Unlike novels of today which presume a reader will have access to extra information or can “google” for more, “Bonds” is complete. It is the delightfully balanced mix of historical fiction, facts, authorial intervention, and moral judgement. In their desire to be poltically correct in their sentences and subject matters, writers of today forget that sitting upon judgement whether their characters or by extension society, is not always a bad thing. It is a way of seeing. “Bonds” has it all. In the next three parts, Diaz does an incredible unpicking of the “truths” that the novelist chose to share. Curiously enough the reader is first made privy to the novella and in the last of the woman, Mildred Bevel, who is at the centre of these multiple stories. Reading her diaries is a shatteringly pathetic experience. She is a woman who lacked no want and yet no amount of money could buy her the peace, health, goodwill, or long life. It was a frictionless existence that in some ways did her in. She had nothing to do. Self-flagellation as claimed by Harold Vanner was one outlet but her diaries claim otherwise. As does the witnessing by her husband Andrew Bevel. Ida Partenza is a compelling narrator but thoroughly unreliable as she was ostensibly Andrew Bevel’s ghostwriter and was not given access to any of the people or documents at the time of writing. Interestingly enough she was sufficiently obsessed with Mildred Bevel that late in life she read Mildred Bevel’s papers and diaries at the library where the material lay. It had been untouched for decades. Thereby exposing her fragility and vulnerability while blasely dismissing the woman’s narrative and only accepting that version of her story which came through male filters. But the arrangement of texts within “Trust” leaves the reader questioning authoritative accounts and relying on empirical evidence. Sadly, it is all constructed. Whom does the reader trust?

Diaz has to be complemented for the very modern sensibility in his writing of switching gears between various gendered perspectives and telling a story. When he does the voice of women his brilliance shines. I hope to goodness he is not shut down for cultural appropriation of women’s voices — he is excellent. He also gets across the desire of Andrew Bevel to be a controlling man, with his masculine narratives very well.

Trust is superb. Read it. For the story. For the ingenious storytelling. For the sophisticated writing. You will not regret it. I hope it finds a mention on the Booker Prize longlist that is to be announced in late July 2022.

Update: This book did make it to the Booker longlist, but it never made it to the shortlist. Nevertheless, its word-of-mouth success and the number of other literary awards it has reaped, including the Kirkus Award and a Barack Obama recommendation, has ensured that this book has remained in the buzz. It is superb!

Pan Macmillan did well in publishing it.

24 Jan 2023

David J. Garrow “Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama”

Pulitzer-prize winning biographer David J. Garrow spent nearly nine years researching and writing Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama. Garrow interviewed more than a 1000 people for the biography of Obama. It is a voluminous 1400 pages with nearly 300 pages of footnotes and bibliography.

Rising Star is true to its name as in excrutiating detail it documents minutely facts about Obama’s life , mostly before he became president of USA. It is a biography that is probably going to be referred to for many years to come for the extensive research put in but the veracity of its authencity will forever be questioned, as pointed out by the Guardian and the New York Times book reviews. Both the articles criticise Garrow for relying far too much on Obama’s ex-girlfriend Sheila Miyoshi Jager for information.

Richard Holmes in an article published in the NYRB, “A Quest for the Real Coleridge”( 18 Dec 2014,  )  explained the two principles that govern the methodology for the biographies he writes. According to him these are –the footsteps principle ( “the serious biographer must physically pursue his subject through the past. Mere archives were not enough. He must go to all the places where the subject had ever lived or worked, or traveled or dreamed. Not just the birthplace, or the blue-plaque place, but the temporary places, the passing places, the lost places, the dream places.”) and the two-sided notebook concept ( “It seemed to me that a serious research notebook must always have a form of “double accounting.” There should be a distinct, conscious divide between the objective and the subjective sides of the project. This meant keeping a double-entry record of all research as it progressed (or as frequently, digressed). Put schematically, there must be a right-hand side and a left-hand side to every notebook page spread.”).  Richard Holmes adds, “He [the biographer] must examine them as intelligently as possible, looking for clues, for the visible and the invisible, for the history, the geography, and the atmosphere. He must feel how they once were; must imagine what impact they might once have had. He must be alert to “unknown modes of being.” He must step back, step down, step inside.”

Garrow won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Biography for Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (1986).  But since the 1980s till today there has been a tectonic shift in how biographies are written. A good example is the beautifully written biography of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson. Unfortunately it seems Garrow with this particular biography of Obama has been unable to evolve from the stodgy 1980s style of writing biographies.  In Rising Star Garrow fails to do precisely what Richard Holmes delineated — “step back, step down, step inside”. Hence it is easier to read the book in morsels rather than from beginning to end. Rising Star is outdated and dull for modern readers who prefer zippy, well-written narratives that are nuanced with analysis. Though in an interview in Longreads Garrow says it is the  “self-creation” or living a life of
“re-invention” of an individual that fascinates him the most. Undoubetedly it is this mission that comes through clearly except making it very tedious to read.

The nine years spent by Garrow researching this book more or less coincide with the two terms Obama spent at the White House. The book itself was published within months of Obama demiting office indicating a slight haste to reach the market quickly. But given the wealth of information garnered Garrow would have done well if he had spent a little longer editing Rising Star and gaining an objective perspective on his subject. He probably would have had a timeless classic.

Despite it being a dreary read Rising Star will prove to be a seminal book in time to come. It will be the go-to biography of Obama for its meticulous documentation particularly the endnotes and extensive bibliography.

David J. Garrow Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama William Collins, an imprint of Harper Collins Publishers, London, 2017. Pb. pp.1460 Rs 799

28 June 2017

Alec Ross “The Industries of the Future”

The day history is made in USA with Hillary Clinton becoming the Democratic Party’s Presidential nominee and endorsed by outgoing President of the USA, Barack Obama it is worth looking at Alec Ross’s book The Industries of the Future. Alec Ross served as Hillary Clinton’s senior advisor for innovation while she was Secretary of State. Before working for Clinton, Alec Ross had worked as the convenor for technology and media policy on the Obama campaign that beat her in the 2008 presidential primary.

Alec Ross’s The Industries of the Future is a fascinating account of how much innovation is taking place in the world,Alec Ross in geographical corners that are mostly hidden from media view. He discusses robotics, genomics, cyber security, digital technology and finance, blockchains and bitcoins, etc. This is the kind of book that will be a reference document now to understand innovations and will have a long shelflife for its historical value in contextualising and explaining innovations that will define twenty-first century. What comes across strongly is that Alex Ross does not view innovations as disruptive but with wide-eyed wonder at the business potential and positive socio-economic impact these measures will have in future. Today it may seem as if these innovations are nudging just the limits of that is plausible yet many of these practices/ predictions are slowly coming true in one’s lifetime. Much like the automatic sliding doors of Gene Roddenberry’s stories of the 1960s were considered to be innovative are now very common in modern life.

Here is a wonderful interview with Alex Ross by Jinoy Jose P in the Hindu Businessline : http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/opinion/the-future-world/article8544279.ece . It was published on 1 May 2016.

Alex Ross’s book is truly stupendous. Hilary Clinton will do well to have him return to her team. Meanwhile read it. Buy it.

Alex Ross Industries of the Future Simon & Schuster, London, 2016. Pb. pp. 310 Rs 599

10 June 2016 

 

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