The third narrative is a memoir of Andrew Bevel's ghostwriter behind his autobiography, Ida Partenza, daughter of an Italian anarchist. In the 1980s, 70-year-old Partenza steps into the Bevels' former residence and, while reviewing their archives, discovers the brief, fragmented but profound journals of Mildred Bevel written before her death — the fourth narrative.
As Diaz's rigorous writing unfolds, previous plots become doubtful and overturned. "I thought it would be much more interesting to have readers experience these different voices and feel them," Diaz told China Daily about the polyphonic structure of his work.
"There isn't just a monolithic truth," Diaz says. "Truth emerges from the intersection of many different stories on the negotiation of different points of view, and out of the noisy, messy and confusing dissonance of the various voices emerges something we could precariously call truth."
Everything is prismatic; such unstable, questionable, nonfinal "truth" should be revised, revisited and critiqued, he adds.
The author thus provides a piece of advice in facing an age where reality itself has become a luxury: "I fail all the time and it's not a comfortable position to be in, but I try to be flexible and limber. I try to find a very difficult balance between a sort of paranoia and a firm belief that truth is something that we may never attain but it's worth looking for and fighting for.
"Believe in truth but don't believe in those who say they have the truth."
Zhang Li, a professor from the School of Chinese Language and Literature at Beijing Normal University, says the novel reminds her of lychee.
"At first, it read like the hard shell of lychee and I didn't like it that much. Then I touched the soft part and sensed there was something with power. I removed it and saw the hard core — in terms of this novel, it's the incognito, silenced female who wants to reclaim the power of narrative and be discovered," she commented during a public dialogue with Diaz at the Columbia Global Centers in Beijing on May 15.
One major intention behind Diaz's work is the fact that all over the world, the voices of women, making up half of the human population, have long been suppressed.
Despite his self-proclaimed low-key, moderate attitude, he claims it's difficult to find the perfect way to put his views on women-related topics, and points out the period in US history when women were excluded from the financial world.
Their exposure was limited to wife or secretary, and it was not until 1967 that the New York Stock Exchange allowed its first female floor broker and not until the 1960s could women open a bank account without a male cosigner, Diaz adds.
For decades women were associated mainly with domestic genres of writing like letters and diaries, whereas men could give speeches, write novels and make public pronouncements.
"If Trust had a volume control, it lowered the more you read until you were left with this whisper," Diaz says about the difference in volume of the two genders' voices. "We have been taught to trust more in the voices that are louder, which of course is entirely wrong."
Diaz says he tries to strive for true equality of the voices between genders while at the same time highlighting the differences in these voices — a paradox in a way that "if you say there are no male or female voices, that's wrong; but if you say there is a big difference between them, that's also wrong".
