Facts: Hernán Diaz
Born: 1973 in Argentina. Partly grew up in Sweden.
Background: Doctorate in literary studies at New York University.
Occupation: Editor of the academic journal Revista Hispánica Moderna, author.
Lives: In Brooklyn, New York.
Family: Wife and daughter.
Nationality: American, Argentine and Italian.
Currently reading: “Pale horse, pale rider” by Katherine Anne Porter. Just bought “Löpa varg” by Kerstin Ekman at Hedengren’s bookstore in Stockholm.
It is not the coffee that arouses Hérnan Díaz’s spontaneous appreciation but the image of the tray on which it is served:
— Emil in Lönnerberga, Emiiiiil, he says in perfect Swedish and imitates Allan Edwall’s angry exclamation.
For many years he lives in Brooklyn, New York and works at Columbia University. But this year’s Pulitzer Prize winner spent his first three years at Högsätraskolan in Lidingö.
Hernán Diáz was born in Argentina but came to Sweden as a two-year-old when his parents fled the junta. They returned in 1983 but Hernán Diáz would eventually study in London and do his doctorate in New York. “Ronja Rövardotter” may have been the first chapter book that he read himself and in connection with the Swedish publication of his new novel, he also met old friends on Lidingö. His Swedish elementary school teacher just emailed congratulations on the Pulitzer Prize.
— I don’t think I would have been who I am if I hadn’t lived here. Swedish became my bridge to English, I love being here, my wife is half Swedish, it’s just a coincidence but still. I speak Swedish with my mother-in-law, he says, but still wants to give the interview in English.
Alone Håkan
His first novel, “In the distance”, is about the poor 19th-century Swedish emigrant Håkan who, in deep loneliness, crosses the Californian desert in search of his brother Linus. But it is with the second, “Egendom”, that Diáz’s writing is now introduced in Swedish. This time he starts in the American financial world at the time of the stock market crash of 1929 and in a fictitious financier, although Díaz’s focus is completely different.
— I am very interested in how fiction affects our lives, I am deeply involved in it. And it struck me that one of the fictions that affects us the most is money. Money has the structure of fiction, it only works because we all believe in it. There is also no correlation between a five-euro note and its purchasing power, it’s just something we’ve agreed upon.
“There were zero women in the American financial world until very recently,” says Hernán Diáz. Literary Excavation
All fortunes rest on some form of expropriation and the American ones came out of slavery, says Hernán Diáz. As little as he wanted to portray the stock market floor, just as little did he want to give the lead role to his omnipotent businessman Andrew Bevel. “Property” is instead a kind of literal, literary archaeological dig to expose the female voices that lie beneath. To get there, Hernán Diáz spent a lot of time in the document archives left behind by American tycoons, not least during a scholarship year at the New York Public Library.
— I always asked for the women’s documents, he says, and talks about librarians who delivered boxes whose private letters were tied together with strings that had never been loosened before.
— These women were among the most affluent people on the planet and they lived hugely corseted, restricted and tiny lives with no movement whatsoever, they did nothing and it wasn’t because they didn’t want to – I dare say – it was because this was the place they were assigned.
“Property” is actually four books in one. In order to get to the very heart of the novel, Hernán Diáz has taken on the role of four very different authors who, with different variations and narrative perspectives, reflect parts of the same story: a novel by a fictional author, the financier’s rambling autobiography, a biography and a prose poem.
Bold poor clerk
The story begins in the realistic novel tradition and ends in the modernist one. Book three is about the bold Ida Partenza, a young poor clerk in 30’s depression New York who is commissioned by the financier to write his and his dead wife Mildred’s biography as the financier himself wants it. There, Hernán Diáz glanced at, among others, Joan Didion to find Ida Partenza’s style.
The very purpose of the four books wasn’t really to find out what really happened – although he does that too:
— Mildred is the oversized genius but she also had to have a big heart and a big sensitivity. It’s the most intimate thing I’ve written, I’m a little ashamed that people have read it. But if there’s one big reveal, it’s that the reader finally gets to hear her own voice, and that voice must be able to land. It was the most important thing in the book, and it was terrifying to write.