Promise come true de facto. The thing about Hernán Díaz with his Pulitzer Prize for Novels 2023, exaequo with Barbara Kingslover, is a direct assault on the summits of international literature. For this he only had to equip himself with two novels (great novels, yes) with which for the moment he takes us to disparate past scenarios made in the USA that perhaps together make up a perfect presentation of the current United States.
Mixing an intimate notion, which achieves the most psychological intention, with a clear sociological interest, everything that takes place in the works of Hernán Díaz manages to offer itself to us as the perfect mix, the narrative cocktail capable of satisfying the palates of those who seek an anthropological interest from the historical fiction as well as those looking for character stories in the most fast-paced epic of existence.
In a certain unclassifiable way beyond landing in one era or another, perhaps because his work has just taken off and we still do not have the whole, the vision with perspective. Meanwhile, each novel that we discover will trap us like the detail of the scenes within the great mosaic. Because the imaginary of a writer like Hernán Díaz ends up unfolding with the beauty of detail, with the taste of the brushstroke. An author to take into account.
Top recommended novels by Hernán Díaz
Fortuna
Every search for a destination is a spin of the wheel of fortune. Will and whim, intention and chance. Everything happens, even more so in a world bursting with vanities, like a bet between ambitions, dreams, envy, guilt... those sensations of the human that are also composed from the contradictions to ride. Even more so when the world of literary creation itself opens up to us as a play of light and shadow, of mirrors with a precise or distorting image, depending on how reality can be approached with more or less subjectivity.
In the triumphant twenties, Benjamin Rask and his wife Helen rule New York: he, a financial magnate who has amassed a fortune; she, the daughter of some eccentric aristocrats. But as the decade draws to a close, and his excesses reveal a dark side, suspicion begins to surround the Rask...
That is the starting point of Obligaciones, a bestselling novel from 1937 that everyone in New York seems to have read and that tells a story that can, however, be told in a few other ways. In Fortuna, Hernán Díaz composes a masterful literary puzzle: a sum of voices, of confronting versions that complement, qualify and contradict each other, and, in doing so, place the reader before the frontiers and limits between reality and fiction, between the truth –perhaps impossible to find– and its manipulated version.
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.
Here is a novel that, as it travels through the XNUMXth century, catches the reader on the first page and does not let go until the last, keeping them in permanent tension thanks to the fascinating literary game that it proposes, full of surprises and unexpected twists.
In the distance
It is always good to meet daring authors, capable of taking on the task of telling different stories, far beyond the hackneyed labels such as "disruptive" or "innovative." Hernan Diaz presents this novel with the undeniable freshness of someone who writes something just for the sake of it, with a transgressive intention in substance and form, magically tuning into the strange times we live in.
In the plot, Díaz takes a course between the fabulous and the allegorical, but always interspersed with the crude realism that marks his western scenery, a trip backwards from coast to coast of the United States as an excuse for an adventure full of symbolism.
It seems to me in style to the recent Spanish literary boom Jesus Carrasco. Rich setting favored by the exuberance of details and the sum of almost physical impressions. Only then each one ends up writing with that delicious anarchy of the new storytellers determined to chronicle any time, borrowing the saturated imaginary of our frenetic times.
Håkan Söderström, known as "the Falcon", a young Swedish immigrant who arrives in California in the middle of the Gold Rush, undertakes an impossible pilgrimage in the direction of New York, without speaking the language, in search of his brother Linus, whom he lost when embarked in Europe.
On his bizarre journey, Håkan encounters an insane Irish gold prospector and a toothless woman who dresses him in a velvet coat and buckled shoes. You will meet a visionary naturalist and get hold of a horse named Pingo.
He will be chased by a sadistic sheriff and a couple of predatory civil war soldiers. He will catch animals and forage for food in the desert, eventually becoming an outlaw. He will end up retiring to the mountains to subsist for years as a trapper, in the midst of untamed nature, without seeing anyone or speaking, in a kind of planned destruction that is, at the same time, a rebirth. But the myth of him will grow and the supposed exploits of him will make him a legend.
