Wealth It is a colossal novel, its 434 pages require the reader to meditate for days and, even better, return to many pages. Hernán Díaz, an Argentinian who writes in English and lives in New York, won this year’s Pulitzer Prize, and you must read it to appreciate its rich and multifaceted story, its powerful structure.

It is natural for us that economic wealth multiplies by itself. Seen from the outside, financial operations seem to take place in an abstract world, which has its own language and numerical codes that only experts can understand. But the rich are here to show that economic empires can be built between inheritance and risky actions. This is where things go in this novel, which I simplify with my own words, but I reduce its complicated course in which there are no certainties.

Díaz decides to tell the story through four versions: novel, autobiography, memoir and diary fragments. The former, as the genre dictates, has a license to invent, to create characters, even if they have a reference in real life; This leads the tycoon, who feels moved by the imaginary language, to react to “clarify the lies” and compose a version of his life that, written by the middleman, depicts the inspired construction of his wealth and the virtuous personality of his wife. When the editor, decades later, remembers that work contract, the reader will be able to compare previous versions and read over her shoulder some secret pages that will give him the final illumination to understand the whole.

One of the many shining points is produced by the text when it shows the use of four completely different forms of writing: phrasing, vocabulary, laconism, fluidity, contained elegance, the ability to suggest, they are used depending on who is writing and with what intentions. The millionaire, imbued with false modesty, justifies his financial actions by advocating free behavior – according to him, the Federal Reserve was created to limit individual initiatives – which in his case always coincided with his spirit of service to the country. Fall like a crash

1929 in the United States cannot be the responsibility of one person, he asserts, though his thinking aloud reveals the enormous responsibility he had in that event.

At the center of three versions is a woman, the fourth is her own voice. Who is she and, above all, what kind of rich man’s wife is she: an affectionate woman who introduced a note of home into a castle that looked like a museum, or perhaps a generous benefactor who supported artists and libraries, perhaps an aristocrat who adorned His origin is the marriage of a Jewish millionaire. Why does the husband, offended by the image that the first novel paints of her – even an inglorious death – try to clean her up by concealing and distorting it?

Unraveling that ball is a wonderful intellectual exercise that we readers of Hernán Díaz undertake with pleasure and a pronounced interest in which there is nothing policing, but an authentic desire to solve the mystery of a personality. Who wants to venture into these pages, prepare to read ambitious lucidity. (OR)