Harvard Square - by André Aciman (Paperback)
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<p/><br></br><p><b> About the Book </b></p></br></br>So candid, so penetrating and so beautifully written that it can make you feel cut open, emotionally exposed. --Sam Sacks, <em>Wall Street Journal</em><p/><br></br><p><b> Book Synopsis </b></p></br></br><p>It's the fall of 1977, and amid the lovely, leafy streets of Cambridge a young Harvard graduate student, a Jew from Egypt, longs more than anything to become an assimilated American and a professor of literature. He spends his days in a pleasant blur of seventeenth-century fiction, but when he meets a brash, charismatic Arab cab driver in a Harvard Square caf, everything changes.</p><p>Nicknamed Kalashnikov--Kalaj for short--for his machine-gun vitriol, the cab driver roars into the student's life with his denunciations of the American obsession with "all things jumbo and ersatz"--Twinkies, monster television sets, all-you-can-eat buffets--and his outrageous declarations on love and the art of seduction. The student finds it hard to resist his new friend's magnetism, and before long he begins to neglect his studies and live a double life: one in the rarified world of Harvard, the other as an exile with Kalaj on the streets of Cambridge. Together they carouse the bars and caf s around Harvard Square, trade intimate accounts of their love affairs, argue about the American dream, and skinny-dip in Walden Pond. But as final exams loom and Kalaj has his license revoked and is threatened with deportation, the student faces the decision of his life: whether to cling to his dream of New World assimilation or risk it all to defend his Old World friend.</p><p><em>Harvard Square</em> is a sexually charged and deeply American novel of identity and aspiration at odds. It is also an unforgettable, moving portrait of an unlikely friendship from one of the finest stylists of our time.</p><p/><br></br><p><b> Review Quotes </b></p></br></br><br><em>Harvard Square</em> sings as a portrait of a fleeting friendship, revealing how platonic closeness can have a romantic tinge as well.--Mark Athitakis "Minneapolis Star Tribune"<br><br>[Aciman's] best so far...an existentialist adventure worthy of Kerouac.--Clancy Martin "New York Times Book Review"<br><br>A darker account of exile itself and the uncertainties of accommodation to a new world while memories of the old tug painfully.... Kalaj [is] warm, impetuous, and whole-hearted.... Aciman succeeds in making him unforgettable.--Richard Eder "Boston Globe"<br><br>A plaintive love letter to displaced, wandering people, to anyone who longs for home and reaches unwisely for the hand of a fellow wanderer.--Ron Charles "Washington Post"<br><br>Aciman tackles Big Ideas by observing the smallest, most intimate gestures of two people and letting them talk--and his characters talk beautifully.--Stephan Lee "Entertainment Weekly"<br><br>An illuminating character study and poignant meditation on the twin trials of how to fit in and how to be loved.--Malcom Forbes "San Francisco Chronicle"<br><br>Brilliant...A novel of education and isolation, sad and funny and sure to provoke nostalgia for anyone's college years.--Jessica Freeman-Slade "The Millions"<br><br>Entertaining and moving....Aciman writes a vigorous, muscular prose that is as seductive as his characters.--Julia M. Klein "Chicago Tribune"<br><br>Powerful... As in so many classic novels before it, <em>Harvard Square</em> emphasizes both the friendliness and the callousness of America and Americans, the way the country's great privilege serves as both magnet and goad.... Intense and thoughtful.--Adam Kirsch "Tablet"<br><br>Slyly comic...Touching and beautifully written.--Charles McGrath "New York Times"<br><br>Timely, affecting...Quietly tragic.-- "The New Yorker"<br>
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