Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed,

or you are the only animal,

who can think, who can reason, who can read.

From KCRW, Santa Monica, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today, my guest is Viken Berberian.

He's the author most recently of a novel, Das Capital, a novel of Love and money markets. He is the author as well of the

cyclist. Both books have been published by Simon and Schuster. Now, one of the things that I

notice, what's so peculiar about this book is, while I'm tempted to call it a satirical novel, it doesn't quite state the case.

How do you see its tone?

I think it's a serious book, but I also see it as a satirical book, a satire of ideologies and the people who live within these ideologies, whether

these ideologies, they cover all the isms, hypercapitalism, Marxism, Situationism. So I do try to have fun and make fun at some of the people

who inhabit these ideologies and are completely confined by them.

And so in some ways, it is satirical,

but I think I also read it as a serious story about many other things.

The main character is a stock trader, Wayne,

who has this very Cartesian scientific, mechanical,

almost view of the world and the way things work.

And his transformation, so to speak,

into someone who's more sensible, more human, if you will,

thanks to this woman, a French woman who he meets.

...