What kind of man you are, if you're a man at all

KAPITOIL has such a great premise that it took me weeks to realize it basically collapses in on itself. The novel purports to be the transcribed audio diary of Karim Issar, who has come to New York from Qatar on a programming assignment tied to the Y2K bug at a financial services firm -- a job he takes to support his shopkeeper father and make sure his younger sister can go to college. Living in the city allows Karim to be exposed to forms of debauchery not available in Qatar, like sexy Halloween parties (a very funny scene) and Leonard Cohen, but before he has a social life he finds the time to invent an algorithm that trades stocks according to news stories from the Middle East, making his employer a fantastic, stupid amount of money in the process.

The question with which we wrestle over Karim is how he can be so morally relative in the classic end-of-the-innocence sense, until the one instance where he decides he cannot budge -- when his employer starts taking steps to own Kapitoil. This is what makes Karim so human and KAPITOIL so troublesome. It would be a great book for a discussion setting because it doesn't strain to ask, What would you do? (Judging by my reaction to the end of this book, I think he chose wrong, but that led to a fair amount of soul searching on my part over whether I was the one being the moral relativist.) The trouble isn't that Karim is smart or not smart in order to pull this all off, it's that he seems smart enough sometimes and not others. In any case, he's way over his head on a couple of levels, and that is both realistic and (because of its realism) difficult territory to cover as a reader because of his own unawareness of his trouble.

The layer of timeliness works in concert with his dilemma; as an Arab national working for a U.S. financial firm, Karim's life would be dramatically altered by 9/11 no matter what he chose in the moment, but we don't find out because the book ends in December, 2000. I only hesitate to call it a "pre-9/11 novel" as Vanity Fair did because technically that covers most of Western literature.

Contextual note: I picked this book up after reading its review in the Tournament of Books 2011 and am toying with working my way through the whole list. You could do worse than working through this list if you are pressed for time on your award winners past. For my own reference mostly, here it is:

• FREEDOM 
• KAPITOIL (meta-link!!!)
• ROOM
• BAD MARIE
• SAVAGES 
• THE FINKLER QUESTION (Man Booker Prize winner)
• A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD (Pulitzer winner)
• SKIPPY DIES
• NOX
• LORD OF MISRULE (National Book Award winner)
• NEXT (The Believer Book Award winner)
• SO MUCH FOR THAT
• SUPER SAD TRUE LOVE STORY
• MODEL HOME
• THE PARTICULAR SADNESS OF LEMON CAKE
• BLOODROOT (off the blog)