Watching the morning finance reports at the gym these days, I’ve been holding my breath hoping someone will mention the prophetic genius of Das Kapital: A Novel of Love and Money Markets, fearing that I might fall off the tread-climber if they do. This book is an almost literal blueprint for the ugly dance of today’s market. It is the story of falls of economic theories rarely challenged, of stocks hardly imagined volatile, and of people whose spine never twitches in front of a Bloomberg terminal.

Berberian immediately grasps your attention by his oft heavily-footnoted baroque passages building the story's three main characters through whom, in a resilient manner, he penetrates your daily thought - even if you are not a person of finance or terrorism, or prone to longing for international love.

Wayne is a shrewd, sharply-attired, Wall Street brat who takes for granted his overpriced flat’s cutting edge designer lamps, and is viciously addicted to reading Marx while reaching the apex of profitmaking, daily, at a hedge fund. The Corsican, perhaps the last torchbearer of the Situationist movement, vanquished by the market-foulplay-driven downfall of his native Bustaci timber company, and intent on revolutionizing society to nurture its ailing ecology, collaborates with Wayne in terrorizing world money markets to capitalize on falling prices. Alix, a delectable architecture student in loud Marseille, with quirky habits and a stubborn streak, jumps with equal fervor onto rooftops and into the psyche of Wayne and the Corsican, introducing them to what they both mistakenly consider an ephemeral emotion.

If you are interested in a story about the vortex of love and how towers of stability fall in and for it, then this story, refreshingly not with a clear beginning, middle and end, is for you. Berberian will entice you with his borderline obsessive-compulsive description of the environments and conditions surrounding the conception and demise of this love story between Alix and Wayne, and between the Corsican and Alix. Although the novel is episodic at times, you’ll feel sufficiently enraptured to plow through the fall of money markets, to find the story’s flow once again, and experience the romanticism he delicately showcases.

If you are interested in the tragic goings on of today’s money market and how Marx’s dramatically structured thesis can hold true even while pieces of it fall one theory at a time, then this story is clearly for you as well. Marx believed the laws of capitalism were scientific in nature and could be approached objectively. He identified capitalism as the stage in which profit motives rule and the wealth of the wealthy is protected by law. As such, he predicted a revolution by the proletariat if and when society reached the state of poverty amidst the plenty.