Benjamin Rask was always rich. He inherited a large fortune from his family’s tobacco plantations. But things would not have been much different if he had been born poor, because thanks to his exceptional mathematical brain he increased his wealth in the stock market exponentially. It did not seem easy to find a partner for Rask, not fond of debauchery, immersed day and night in his accounting books.
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 funfair monkey who entertained her parents’ friends with her incredible arithmetic skills and extraordinary gift for learning languages.
Benjamin and Helen met and, naturally, married. Their romance blossomed in the 1920s and together they lived and grew rich beyond measure 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 (Periscopi, with translation by Josefina Caball), 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 no one, not even the Nobel laureates in economics, knows why it happened”, he explains Díaz in an interview with La Vanguardia. However, the writer was 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 irrationally, and while it is true that there is a positivist component, it is also true that there is an area of ??economics that has to do with affect, that is governed by desire, that is something discursive, not mathematical”, he adds.
That irrational element of the financial system has not been corrected and this has an inevitable consequence: “There can be a crisis like that of 1929 at any time”, says the writer, because “economic crises are structural, in the United States they happen one after the other since 1865, there have been eight and there will continue to be”. “The question is not whether there will be more 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 omelet is turned. Another narrator, Andrew Bevel, presents his autobiography which has elements in common with Benjamin’s experiences. And later Ida Partenza, who was a secretary in New York in the thirties, presents her memories of the time she met the powerful Bevel. And then he gives voice to who was his wife, Mildred Bevel, whose writing has much more to do with that of Virginia Woolf. Four visions that make up an exciting literary puzzle.
A deliberate puzzle with which Díaz wanted to reflect “the transition of the novel from the late 19th and early 20th centuries towards the modernist” and at the same time show “the voice of the women who were relegated to the narrative epic”. In Fortuna (and in real life), “men seize the intelligence of women, suppress them, although in the twenties an element of modernity occurs with the appearance of the figure of the secretary, that you can make a place in the middle class because of your work and not because you got married”.
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 teenage years I fell in love with the English literary tradition. As soon as I could I moved to England and then to the United States so that I could live in English. It’s a sensual matter, what I feel when I speak it and the happiness it gives me to construct sentences in this language”.
