Trust

Trust shows the reader four versions of a story. Firstly, Bonds, presented as a novel by Harold Vanner, describes how Wall Street businessman Benjamin Rask manages to amass a huge fortune in spite of the financial crises in New York in the early twentieth century, while his wife Helen struggles with mental health issues in an institution in Switzerland. In the second manuscript, Andrew Bevel, on whom the character Benjamin Rask is based, is furious about how he and his wife Mildred are portrayed. So he hires Ida Partenza, a young aspiring author and daughter of an Italian anarchist, to write his autobiography. By then, Mildred has died and so Ida only hears Andrew's side of the story. Decades later, however, when Ida unexpectedly has access to Mildred’s diaries, a surprising picture emerges. We keep on reading because we want to learn ‘the truth’, but at the same time we are forced to think about how fiction works and to what extent a narrator can be trusted.