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    Kapitoil: A Novel
    Unavailable
    Kapitoil: A Novel
    Unavailable
    Kapitoil: A Novel
    Ebook308 pages4 hours

    Kapitoil: A Novel

    By Teddy Wayne

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    “A brilliant book. Karim Issar is one of the freshest, funniest heroes I’ve come across in a long time.” — Ben Fountain, bestselling author of Brief Encounters with Che Guevara

    “An innovative and incisive meditation on the wages of corporate greed, the fundamental darkness of its vision lit by the author’s great comic intelligence and wit.” — Kathryn Davis, author of The Thin Place, Hell: A Novel, and Versailles

    With a fresh and singular voice, Teddy Wayne marks his literary debut with the story of one 26 year old Middle Eastern man’s attempt to live the American Dream in New York City. Like the award-winning Netherland and The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Kapitoil provides an absorbing look into American culture and New York finance from an outsider’s perspective.

    "Sometimes you do not truly observe something until you study it in reverse," writes Karim Issar upon arrival to New York City from Qatar in 1999. Fluent in numbers, logic, and business jargon yet often baffled by human connection, the young financial wizard soon creates a computer program named Kapitoil that predicts oil futures and reaps record profits for his company.

    At first an introspective loner adrift in New York's social scenes, he anchors himself to his legendary boss Derek Schrub and Rebecca, a sensitive, disillusioned colleague who may understand him better than he does himself. Her influence, and his father's disapproval of Karim's Americanization, cause him to question the moral implications of Kapitoil, moving him toward a decision that will determine his future, his firm's, and to whom—and where—his loyalties lie.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateApr 13, 2010
    ISBN9780061989926
    Unavailable
    Kapitoil: A Novel
    Author

    Teddy Wayne

    Teddy Wayne, the author of Loner, The Love Song of Jonny Valentine, and Kapitoil, is the winner of a Whiting Writers’ Award and an NEA Fellowship as well as a finalist for the Young Lions Fiction Award, PEN/Bingham Prize, and Dayton Literary Peace Prize. He writes regularly for The New Yorker, The New York Times, Vanity Fair, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere. He lives in New York.

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    Reviews for Kapitoil

    4/5

    47 ratings4 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Wow. I loved this book because the character and voice of Karim are pitch-perfect. And Wayne nailed the ending. I'm very, very impressed, and I will definitely be looking for anything Wayne writes in the future.
    • 4/5
      In Teddy Wayne's KAPITOIL, a young emigrant of Qatar, Karim, flies to New York City to work for Schrub Equities, a prominent banking firm. Karim, a genius of mathematics, economics and computer science, has been hired to help reprogram the company's computers to deal with the Y2K transition in five months' time. At Schrub Equities he's assigned to a group of young colleagues including Rebecca Goldman, a recent college graduate who dreams of being a history teacher.

      Karim finds acclimating to U.S. culture troublesome, as language barriers and unfamiliar social norms get in his way. He also has trouble keeping up contact with his father and sister Zahira, a prodigy of the science world, at home in Qatar. Bored by his job, Karim spends some free time researching oil trends, and realizes that he can create a program to predict fluctuations in oil prices based on events in the Middle East. Whoever uses the program to predict oil prices can make huge profits, as long as no one else becomes aware of its existence. He creates the program, titling it Kapitoil, and brings it to the attention of his boss, who quickly decides to give it a trial run. After fixing some initial errors, Karim is able to make Kapitoil run smoothly and make big gains for Schrub Equities. In no time at all, he's brought to the attention of the president, Mr. Schrub, who gives Karim a payraise and promotion and begins personally grooming him for a leadership position in the company.

      As Karim's standing in the workplace rises, his social standing does as well. He gets a taste of the lifestyle of the wealthy, attending a World Series game with Mr. Schrub and flying out by helicopter to Greenwich, Conneticut for a weekend with the Schrubs at their luxurious home. Meanwhile, his relationship with Rebecca deepens from friendship to romance. But conflict with his father over the best course of Zahira's education (for which Karim is partially paying) weighs on his mind, and some uneasy exchanges with Mr. Schrub cause him to wonder whether his boss is trying to swindle him out of ownership of Kapitoil. When Karim realizes that he might be able to apply the program to fluctuating disease patterns in Third World countries, making it potentially invaluable to the medical community, he must make the choice between unveiling his idea to the public (thereby negating Kapitoil's advantage in the financial market) or protecting the program and his position at Schrub Equities.

      Told from Karim's point of view, KAPITOIL is a fascinating look inside the head of a mathematical genius struggling to adapt to a culture a world apart from the one in which he grew up. Given the timeframe of the book (beginning five months prior to the start of the new millenium) and the ethnic background of the protagonist, KAPITOIL could have been a mouthpiece for thoughts on September 11th, but instead author Wayne chooses to tell the unrelated story of a young Middle Easterner who, significantly, doesn't like being boxed in by Americans' expectations of him. Filled with mechanical and clinical verbs that become awkward on occasion, the unique narration nonetheless manages to relate the humanity and humor of its protagonist. Karim, with his mathematical view of the world and awkward attempts at American jokes, is a quirky and lovable character. Wayne deftly weaves in themes of alienation and moral decline, complex familial and romantic relationships, and an ethical dilemma for Karim to deal with in this entertaining first novel.
    • 4/5
      Extremely compelling narrative voice that never breaks character. This is more cute than funny, though. More morally idealistic than subversive. A lot of cute romance. Nicely captures culture clash through well-drawn characters and situations. Fun exploration of the English language and how foreigners seem to speak and understand it better than Americans do.
    • 3/5
      If you read this book, read it for the tone. Wayne's first person narrator is funny, unlikely and credible. I imagine you have to be a bit of a nerd or at least be interested in language to enjoy this, though. I am.The weakness is the plot. It has different incompatible and often formulaic elements. The ending is weak and does not follow naturally. Yet Wayne can write. I am anxious to read what he writes next.