Benjamin Rask was always rich. He inherited a large fortune from his family’s tobacco plantations. But things would not have been very different if he had been born poor, because thanks to his exceptional mathematical brain, his net worth in the stock market increased exponentially. It did not seem easy to find a mate for Rask, little given to revelry, immersed day and night in his ledgers.
Helen Brevoort was a gifted child at a time when no one knew what a gifted was, and even if it had been known, it would never have been considered that a woman could have such exceptional abilities. So as a child, Helen was something of a carnival monkey who entertained her parents’ friends with her incredible calculating skills and her extraordinary gift for learning languages.
Benjamin and Helen met and, naturally enough, got married. Their romance began in the 1920s and together they lived and became incredibly rich with the crash of ’29. Was Rask the cause of the stock market crash that led to the greatest economic depression in history? The answer is in the pages of Fortuna (Anagram, with translation by Javier Calvo), the latest and exciting novel by Hernán Díaz.
Although there may not be a conclusive answer, because “after having read a lot about the crisis, the most surprising revelation is that nobody, not even the Nobel Prize winners in economics, know why it happened,” Díaz explains in an interview with La Vanguardia. However, the writer has been able to determine two of the causes that led to the Great Depression: “unbridled greed and the rejection that the United States has had of any form of regulation, of government intervention.”
“There is a new trend that raises the effects of psychology in finance, which are not strictly governed by mathematical formulas. Markets can act in an irrational way and, although it is true that there is something positivist, it is also true that there is an area of ??the economy that has to do with affections, that is governed by desire, it is something discursive, not mathematical” , Add.
After the crisis of 29 others came. This irrational element of the financial system has not been corrected and this has an inevitable consequence: “There could be a crisis like the one of 1929 at any time”, affirms the writer, because “economic crises are structural, in the United States they have been happening for 1865, there have been eight and they will continue to exist”. “The question is not if there will be new crises, but why we continue to believe in a system that generates them.” Díaz thus concludes with his financial reflections to move on to talk about literature.
Because Fortuna is a magnificent literary exercise. The novel begins with that story of Benjamin and Helen narrated by a fictional novelist, Harold Vanner, in the manner of Edith Wharton with a few drops of Henry James. But then the tables turn. Another narrator, Andrew Bevel, presents his autobiography that has elements in common with Benjamin’s experiences. And later Ida Partenza, who was a secretary in New York in the 1930s, presents her memories of the times when she met the powerful Bevel. And then she gives voice to her former wife, Mildred Bevel, whose writing has much more to do with Virginia Woolf’s. Four visions that make up an exciting literary puzzle.
An intended puzzle with which Díaz wanted to reflect “the transition from the novel of the late 19th and early 20th centuries to the modernist” and at the same time show “the voice of women who were relegated in the epic narrative”. In Fortuna (and in real life), “men take over women’s intelligence, they suppress it, although in the 1920s an element of modernity is produced with the appearance of the figure of the secretary, who can enter the the middle class for their work and not getting married”.
Díaz could spend hours talking about literature and also language. Born in Argentina and raised in Sweden, he now lives in the United States and writes in English: “I have a love story with English that is difficult to explain, it is almost mystical, I love the syntactic and morphological possibilities of the language. In my teens I fell in love with the English literary tradition. As soon as I could, I moved to England and then to the United States to be able to live in English. It is a sensual question, what it feels like to speak it and the happiness that makes me construct sentences in that language”.
