What do you think?
Rate this book
Das Kapital: A novel of love and money markets
A brash Wall Street trader who makes lucrative profits with the aid of a Corsican terrorist, Wayne orchestrates the bombing of important buildings and landmarks, as well as the deaths of international business leaders, but is unaware that his girlfriend is also involved with the terrorist. 25,000 first printing.
175 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2007
3 people are currently reading
88 people want to read
About the author
Viken Berberian
6 books19 followersViken Berberian is a novelist and author of The Cyclist and Das Kapital: a novel of love & money markets.
His writings have appeared in The New York Times, the Financial Times, the International Herald Tribune, Le Monde Diplomatique, the Los Angeles Times and Inculte, a French literary and philosophical quarterly.
Berberian was awarded a Bourse de Creation from the Centre National du Livre of the French Ministry of Culture (2009-2010).
He was educated at Columbia University and the London School of Economics.
His writings have appeared in The New York Times, the Financial Times, the International Herald Tribune, Le Monde Diplomatique, the Los Angeles Times and Inculte, a French literary and philosophical quarterly.
Berberian was awarded a Bourse de Creation from the Centre National du Livre of the French Ministry of Culture (2009-2010).
He was educated at Columbia University and the London School of Economics.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 40 reviews
December 29, 2008
The title of the novel is a direct play on the Marx/Engels non-fiction analysis on capitalism and its critical applications in society and on the laboring man. Berberian, who has written for the NY & LA Times, as well as for The Financial Times, knows his way around global markets and hedge fund traders, which he exploits to the fullest here.
The action takes place from Manhattan's Wall Street to Marseille's mean streets, revolving around three main players: trader Wayne, architecture student Alix, and the mysterious Corsican. Global economies, terrorism and e-mail connect the three players, cocooned in a literary style that is at once cold and calculating while managing to also be very lyrical and haunting.
It reminded me of a book from the capitalistic 80s that was never written (something that McInerney or Easton Ellis would have written if they weren't so solipsistic) and had tones of narrative structure and tenseness that Alex Garland achieved in the wonderful "The Tesseract."
Ultimately, all of the pieces don't quite come together in the way the author intends, and I was left a little hollower when I finished than when I began... but the writing is tremendous, the juxtaposition between poetic language and stock-trading terminology a near-to-masterful feat. I was never really invested in the characters, yet I followed the author's lead regardless, and let the stellar writing carry me through to the story's conclusion.
The action takes place from Manhattan's Wall Street to Marseille's mean streets, revolving around three main players: trader Wayne, architecture student Alix, and the mysterious Corsican. Global economies, terrorism and e-mail connect the three players, cocooned in a literary style that is at once cold and calculating while managing to also be very lyrical and haunting.
It reminded me of a book from the capitalistic 80s that was never written (something that McInerney or Easton Ellis would have written if they weren't so solipsistic) and had tones of narrative structure and tenseness that Alex Garland achieved in the wonderful "The Tesseract."
Ultimately, all of the pieces don't quite come together in the way the author intends, and I was left a little hollower when I finished than when I began... but the writing is tremendous, the juxtaposition between poetic language and stock-trading terminology a near-to-masterful feat. I was never really invested in the characters, yet I followed the author's lead regardless, and let the stellar writing carry me through to the story's conclusion.
March 1, 2020
A superbly written story about contagion and how interconnected everything is -- nature, the markets, human sentiments. Not laugh-out family but made me smile lots of times and squint in discomfort. The writing is lovely, though the product name-dropping is a bit too much at times. My sole peeve. Four and a half stars really.
July 9, 2018
There is some wonderful use of language in this book, and the author plays a nicely structured game around a very unlikely international love triangle clearly designed to enable the ironic plot rather than to be in any way realistic. Ultimately it sometimes feels the author was straining too hard to be clever, which is a pity because it really has some beautifully wrought parts. My main complaint is in fact the name-dropping - a footnote here, a paragraph there; in some cases the footnote doesn't make it clear that whole sentences have been lifted from, in some cases well-known Marxists, in other cases recent writers. To me this actually weakens the book - are we supposed to go away and read these other texts just to understand the irony? Or can this novel stand on its own feet?
March 8, 2020
This was one of the most difficult books to rate. The writing is very good, and I liked how there were three characters with different beliefs and how they collided in particular between a volatile stock market, the destruction of nature, New York and Marseilles. It's about a short-seller and I don't think it is meant as a satire, certainly not 2020, although funnier than Claude McKay's classic, also set in Marseilles.
It wasn't an easy read for me but, overall, I enjoyed it for its originality.
It wasn't an easy read for me but, overall, I enjoyed it for its originality.
February 26, 2020
Just finished reading this evocative novel about a rout in the stock market. The protagonist, Wayne, is a trader who does does not seem to believe in much. A poetic read about our environment, love, and the inter-connectedness of the world. Eerie and disturbing, will make you reflect about how we continue to ravage our planet.
March 14, 2020
This was, dare I say, kind of prophetic given the Covid-19 pandemic and all, and from what I gather it was written before the financial meltdown of 2008. The psych into the mind of a trader is really well done. I've never seen it captured in fiction. "One thing that world history teaches us is that disaster will befall one who hangs around long enough," and "bond prices surged as if the gods of science had issued a fatwa on the stock market. There simply weren't any buyers," and then, "Wayne waited patiently for the next global failure, a so-called ten-sigma event: a statistical freak occurring one in every ten to the twenty-fourth power times..." Really, a beautiful read, whether you trade, as I do, for a living or not.
September 4, 2010
I first read an interview in the WSJ about this book and found it intimidating, "too erudite" the reviewer said. Many months later I heard an interview on Silverblatt's Bookworm with Berberian and found him thoughtful and funny. The characters converge deftly in this expansive, short novel, connected by electronic, epistolary exchanges and real-time encounters. It is ambitious in scope and pretty damn good read.
October 15, 2010
This book stayed with me for after I put it down. Some have called it prophetic, but I do not have stocks in my portfolio(I spend all my money on Apple products!)His language is playful and sarcastic but also strangely endearing, dynamic and warm. I have not read such a combination. I liked Don Delillo's Cosmopolis but there is a coldness (and thus a lack of humor)in the way Delillo sees the world.
March 16, 2020
Prophetic. Great read during this, I hope short-lived period - of social distancing in the era of Covid-19. Sell, sell, sell, seems to be going viral again. Will not give away the ending but it is refreshingly not deterministic.
August 24, 2010
I am a portfolio manager of a sovereign bond fund and contrary to popular wisdom some of us who work in the industry still enjoy reading good fiction. This is a wonderful satire of the industry, nuanced, vivid and the prose resonates, explodes. The other myth is that you need an advanced degree in math to really make the connections. All you actually need is some imagination and curiosity, otherwise you may find the story challenging. A brilliant portrayal of Wall Street.
October 13, 2010
Beautiful, cinematic read. If you want to be transported to Marseilles or Corsica and get into the existential mind of a wall Street trader, this is the perfect book for you. Original and sweeping.
September 16, 2013
Remarkably haunting and provocative. It has the feel of a fable.
March 11, 2020
An incredibly unique novel full of fantastic writing.
November 10, 2010
This is a wonderful read. The book tells us volumes about our dis-connectedness from the physical, sybaritic world and about our prevailing connectedness via epistolary, electronic messaging, twittering, i-phoning and the like. What is remarkable is how Berberian saw it coming before the net-based social forums and panoply of electronic devices became the rage.
November 24, 2010
GREAT read in Kapital letters. The one thing that I found unnecessary was the scene at the strip bar and the way Berberian uses the theory of declining marginal utility when viewing a naked woman's body over and over again. That theory refers to objects, not humans. Otherwise, the novel is right on the money, if difficult to classify. Berberian is an iconoclast.
September 13, 2010
Perhaps I should have read this novel a few years from now and not after my 401K dropped more than this summer. Berberian's prose was so uplifting and humor so infectuous that I could not put the book down.
September 20, 2010
Timeless. One of the best books I have read in a long time. I loved the Borges-like footnotes. The language resonates.
November 29, 2009
Very odd sequence o' events led me to read this: a few years ago my mama loved Berberian's first book, "The Cyclist." Several times in Iowa City I held a lovely used hardcover but never bought it for $10. A few years later I listened to an interview with Michael Silverblatt about this book, "Das Kapital." A week or so ago I read an essay by Malcolm Gladwell about Nassim Nicholas Taleb and hedge funders who bet on the market to collapse -- this essay originally appeared in the New Yorker well before the market actually collapsed and Nassim Nicholas Taleb published a book called "The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable." The next day, I found "Das Kapital" used for $3 in Philadelphia -- a perfectly fresh hardcover. I started reading. It was about a fictional version of someone very much like Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a "quant" who talked about black swans. Berberian's book is definitely attentively written and deserves close reading -- playful and unpredictable. The characters stand for ideas (empircism, love, Situationism). It's very simple, but charming, and seems like it came out a year too soon in 2007. Definitely worth it if you're ever in the mood for some light-hearted art fiction re: the recent high finance scene. I'd've given this four stars if I wrote this immediately after finishing it, but even just a few days later the book's effects have worn off . . . And now to order for no more than a buck a used hardcover of Berberian's first book.
August 31, 2007
Bold. Crisp, perceptive, witty writing refreshing to read.
August 25, 2010
More original than the Bonfire of the Vanities, funnier than American Psycho, easier to read than Marx. I found this book to be a very good read. Makes me want to go to France.
July 11, 2008
In The Cyclist, Berberian connected love, sex, food, poetry and terrorism. An intriguing combination, kind of like an awkward diamond--maybe a little off-putting at first, but easier to look at over time.
With Das Kapital, Berberian's second book, possibly (but maybe not, considering the publishing industry nowadays--I only question this because the work is nowhere near as tight as the first book), Berberian takes the lyrical writing of The Cyclist down a notch (or three) and instead of presenting the collision of the personal and political, Berberian attacks the economic and fatalist. The intellectual bend here is even more apparent with the occasional footnotes that, for the most part, explain what seems to make sense by itself in the text (or presumes a reader's unwillingness to look things up), and of course the presentation of Wayne, a trader in failure and market crashes rather than gains. Making out well in the ruin of a tree-cutting firm, he entwines himself into the life of the Corsican, who is also entangled with Alix, a Mersailles resident who also happens to be an email correspondent (and cyberlover) of Wayne's.
In his depiction, Berberian presents Wayne as a hardcore trader who is also a hardcore reader and culturalist, echoing far too closely to DeLillo works like Cosmopolis and Americana, maybe even a hint of Falling Man, but Berberian is nowhere near prepared to take a DeLillo plunge and explore the intricacies and counterproductive pulls of the subject matter and its metaphors, but Berberian is instead limited to the superficial play of capitalism and Marxism, love and passion, etc. My earlier suggestion that this may not be Berberian's second work, but maybe an earlier work picked up with the success of The Cyclist is a mere assumption, but overall the writing here didn't seem as tight as in the debut novel. Berberian obviously wants to be a writer of importance, addressing some of the issues of today, but he does so with little sense of the past or the history of a culture--rather, Berberian wants to play with what we have, which is an admirable trait, but begs too much comparison to DeLillo to really make this work stand wisely on its own.
If and when Berberian's next book comes out, I will no doubt snatch it up and give it a thorough read, for he has good stuff going on in here, but this book doesn't seem to come together by the end to make all of my efforts to read this so necessary.
With Das Kapital, Berberian's second book, possibly (but maybe not, considering the publishing industry nowadays--I only question this because the work is nowhere near as tight as the first book), Berberian takes the lyrical writing of The Cyclist down a notch (or three) and instead of presenting the collision of the personal and political, Berberian attacks the economic and fatalist. The intellectual bend here is even more apparent with the occasional footnotes that, for the most part, explain what seems to make sense by itself in the text (or presumes a reader's unwillingness to look things up), and of course the presentation of Wayne, a trader in failure and market crashes rather than gains. Making out well in the ruin of a tree-cutting firm, he entwines himself into the life of the Corsican, who is also entangled with Alix, a Mersailles resident who also happens to be an email correspondent (and cyberlover) of Wayne's.
In his depiction, Berberian presents Wayne as a hardcore trader who is also a hardcore reader and culturalist, echoing far too closely to DeLillo works like Cosmopolis and Americana, maybe even a hint of Falling Man, but Berberian is nowhere near prepared to take a DeLillo plunge and explore the intricacies and counterproductive pulls of the subject matter and its metaphors, but Berberian is instead limited to the superficial play of capitalism and Marxism, love and passion, etc. My earlier suggestion that this may not be Berberian's second work, but maybe an earlier work picked up with the success of The Cyclist is a mere assumption, but overall the writing here didn't seem as tight as in the debut novel. Berberian obviously wants to be a writer of importance, addressing some of the issues of today, but he does so with little sense of the past or the history of a culture--rather, Berberian wants to play with what we have, which is an admirable trait, but begs too much comparison to DeLillo to really make this work stand wisely on its own.
If and when Berberian's next book comes out, I will no doubt snatch it up and give it a thorough read, for he has good stuff going on in here, but this book doesn't seem to come together by the end to make all of my efforts to read this so necessary.
March 16, 2020
This was on list of "hey read these novels". I'm a bit confused by how and why it got there... if someone would like to admit to having recommended it to me, I'd love to know who and why. It was... odd. I feel like there was a moral to the story, but if so, I am lost and confused as to what it was. I mean, I know Vizzini said "Never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line", but perhaps it should have been something involving Corsicans and love, or plants, or something.
Such a weird book.
Such a weird book.
March 6, 2021
3.5 Stars, really, but not quite 4. I liked parts of the novel very much, and was very intrigued by the premise. I think this novel could have been denser and thicker and more involved. I just felt like it never got quite deep enough. The characters did not have enough dimension for me. However, I liked the story and the writing style. I just wanted more, I suppose.
September 6, 2010
An original take on finance. Five stars for oiginality and a compelling, intiricately woven plot that is refreshingly intelligent.
August 15, 2011
Such a delight to read. It was wonderfully written; vivid, poetic, poignant.
February 24, 2020
I enjoy satire, but this was really not my cup of tea. The language was overwrought and the story seemed to collapse under the weight of its self-importance.
March 12, 2020
love in the time of a pendemic, though painful, even when i felt like lmao.
January 27, 2025
It feels so unusual to read the works of the prpfessor who taught you how to write and how to write well! So so lucky to have been Mr. Berberian’s student!!!
February 12, 2008
I took two mathematical finance classes in college while I was completing my undergraduate work. I think those were my saving grace for this book. If I hadn't taken those classes, I wouldn't understand a thing going on. Finally, my education is paying off.
I found this book to be really weird. A love triangle between a stock trader, Wayne, an architecture student, Alix and a Corsican, who the author never named. I couldn't ever figure out if they were all connected in other ways as the author eluded to. It was all very vague.
I didn't find it all that well written. It was hard to follow, even with my extended knowledge. My guess would be that financial analysts and stock traders don't read this kind of smut for fun, so there are probably very few people who would understand the book.
Definitely pass on this one unless you're stranded on an island and it washes ashore. Of course, in that case, almost any book is better than no book. Wish for something better.s
I found this book to be really weird. A love triangle between a stock trader, Wayne, an architecture student, Alix and a Corsican, who the author never named. I couldn't ever figure out if they were all connected in other ways as the author eluded to. It was all very vague.
I didn't find it all that well written. It was hard to follow, even with my extended knowledge. My guess would be that financial analysts and stock traders don't read this kind of smut for fun, so there are probably very few people who would understand the book.
Definitely pass on this one unless you're stranded on an island and it washes ashore. Of course, in that case, almost any book is better than no book. Wish for something better.s
Displaying 1 - 30 of 40 reviews