Harvard Square : a novel /

THERE'S nothing like a college campus in summer. It's peaceful. You feel as if you finally own the place, as if you belong. The classrooms are empty, and you can wander the hallways alone. The undergraduates are gone, the professors traveling or holed up in their offices; a handful of shy grad students, the trees and grass, the fountains and libraries take over. It's like the vanished gardens of Córdoba. "Cambridge was a desert." That's how "Harvard Square," André Aciman's third novel (and best so far), opens: it's the summer of 1977, and the heat cooks Harvard University and its surroundings all summer long. But that's not necessarily a bad thing, because Aciman's hero is himself, like the author, familiar with the desert. He's an immigrant student, a transplant from Alexandria, Egypt - home of the greatest library in history - "staying the whole summer, holding a very parttime summer job in one of the Harvard libraries." The nameless narrator is struggling to get his Ph.D. in literature. An early favorite of his professors, he failed his first round of qualifying exams and has become a bit of a pariah, if only in his imagination. All of his friends are out of town, and he's mostly happy about that, because he owes them money. Like most grad students, and most immigrants, he's broke. (Full disclosure: I too am a broke immigrant.) "When money ran out, which it inevitably did by the end of each month, I'd put on a shirt, a jacket and a tie and have lunch at the faculty club, where, amidst the established Harvard faculty and visiting dignitaries, I would eat on credit." Then, at his favorite hangout, the Cafe Algiers, he meets a Tunisian cabdriver called Kalaj, for Kalashnikov; the name comes from the machine-gun rat-a-tat of his speech. Hearing the shortened version we think "collage," and wonder how many tough-talking, street-smart and sexy Middle Eastern macho men Aciman has collected in this portrait. When the narrator first meets Kalaj, who is in his early 30s, he is haranguing an American student who has made the mistake of talking to him - rather than simply suffering the verbal barrage of this angry philosopher, "a cross between Zorba the Greek on steroids and Rameau's nephew on speed": "Americans loved all things jumbo and ersatz, he was saying. As long as it was artificial and double the value if you bought five times the size you'd ever need, no white American homemaker could resist." "Ersatz" - a substitute or inferior imitation - is Kalaj's favorite word, and he doesn't reserve it for Americans: even Mexican waiters who have to steal food to survive are, in their way, ersatz. "Harvard Square" began as the story "Monsieur Kalashnikov," published in The Paris Review in 2007, and in that story we anticipate the novel that a character like Kalaj demands. Kalaj is the novel, really: the narrator is lost until Kalaj appears, and suddenly, through his crassness, his directness, his honesty, everything that was invisible begins to appear. Kalaj takes the banal but oppressive facts of everyday Cambridge and exposes them as dangerous values. Aciman has been described as a writer obsessed with nostalgia, perhaps in part because he is one of our greatest living scholars of Proust. In The New York Review of Books several years ago, he reminisced, "I had come here, an exile from Alexandria, doing what all exiles do on impulse, which is to look for their homeland abroad, to bridge the things here to things there, to rewrite the present so as not to write off the past." Nostalgia is a form of longing for what is real, and I think "Harvard Square" is, at heart, a sort of new American immigrant existentialism, an attempt to find authenticity in a world so morally complex that a delicate Jewish Ivy League graduate student becomes best friends (and lovers? hard to say) with a boorish Tunisian taxi driver. The summer that the two young men spend together is an existentialist adventure worthy of Kerouac. They hardly leave Cambridge, and not much happens - just as not much happens in "On the Road" - but the way they talk and drink and chase women (and catch them) and argue and swim naked and urinate in Waiden Pond makes the reader remember what it's like to be young and feel that life is about living, that there's more to existence than getting ahead. That it all takes place between exiles acutely conscious of their homelessness - of the conjunction of their inability and their refusal to fit in - heightens the irony and the excitement. They take over campus; they occupy Cambridge; in Kalaj's taxi, cruising at night, they prowl Boston. They become the two immigrants, Arab and Jew, who own and expose one of America's oldest cities. I very much liked Aciman's last novel, "Eight White Nights" (2010), a self-consciously asexual romance that captured the bizarre sexual politics of upper-middle-class New York City, where sex, as Aciman portrays it, takes place more in the imagination, in significant glances at dinner parties and in intellectual conversations, than on a bed. Aciman can do sex when he wants to: his first novel, "Call Me by Your Name" (2007), is already a classic of homoerotic literature. (Reviewing it here, Stacey D'Erasmo opened with: "This novel is hot.") But "Harvard Square" dwarfs both those books. It is enormously intelligent, but all of the allusion is beneath the surface; it is as "literary" as "Eight White Nights" but never self-consciously so. You'll read it in one sitting. I hope it won't sound presumptuous to say that Aciman has found his voice: the lushness of his first novel suited its sensuality, and the angular sentences in his second similarly fit its awkward, drawingroom sensibility - but here it feels as if we are at last reading the real Aciman. His sentences call to mind the late work of V.S. Naipaul: comfortable, unforced, conversational, unafraid. Aciman uses metaphors sparingly, and when he does, they are striking. Of Kalaj, for example, he says: "America was busy stacking up its chips, while he - anyone could tell - was obviously bluffing." IT'S inevitable, but the reader is still sad when it comes: "I began to avoid Kalaj." Summer turns to fall, the semester is in full swing and before long the weather turns cold. Kalaj is scrambling for ways to stay in Cambridge, and the protagonist, who would like to help, also dreads running into him. All along it has seemed as if Kalaj were the heartbreaker, but Aciman turns the fables on us: suddenly the narrator has become one of the boys of summer, the fellows who leave you behind. By the end of "Harvard Square," good old Kalaj has lost everything but his spunk: he doesn't have much to hope for, but he's still complaining about America, accusing every ersatz quality of contemporary life even as he vainly chases after the fantasy world of Cambridge. The narrator, by contrast, has given up: the university welcomes him now, because he is no longer the young man we met at the beginning, who felt rejected by it and was willing to reject it in return. The wild life he lived with Kalaj has become the easy, contented life of the graduate student who is doing well. He's become a Harvard square. Kalaj will wind up - who knows where? The narrator will earn his Ph.D. and get a good job at a nice American university. What could be more insulated and fake than the life of the tenured professor? Aciman asks. What could be more ersatz than Harvard? Clancy Martin is the author of a novel, "How to Sell" His nonfiction book "Love, Lies and Marriage" will appear next year.

A Jewish Egyptian grad student is suffering through a Boston summer in the 1970s, studying for his comprehensive exams and trying to patch together enough cash for food and cigarettes. One day he wanders into Cafe Algiers, where he meets Kalaj, a thirtysomething Arab cab driver who mesmerizes the regulars with his spectacular put-downs (especially of ­jumbo-ersatz America) and his way with women. Drawn together by language (French) and nostalgia for their Mediterranean childhoods, the two spend the summer wandering from bar to bar, picking up women and talking a blue streak about everything from sex to green cards. But as the fall semester starts up, the student becomes acutely aware of the tension between the refined world of Harvard and his friendship with the often erratic and crude Kalaj, who is soon faced with the threat of deportation. Although Aciman's plotting is jumpy, Harvard Square provides an interesting look at the dilemmas of identity, the concept of home, and our enduring need to belong.--Weber, Lynn Copyright 2010 Booklist

Aciman's stock in trade is nostalgia. In his latest novel (after Eight White Nights), another autobiographical hero, this one unnamed, dreams of the past but desires it only as it is conjured in his memory. He looks back at himself as a navel-gazing Egyptian-Jewish Harvard grad student stuck in Cambridge during the lonely and hot, but game-changing, summer of 1977. To avoid studying, he remembers trawling the empty town, running into a Tunisian cab driver named Kalaj, short for Kalashnikov, at a place called Cafe Algiers. Kalaj is everything Aciman's narrator is not: loud, reckless, and brutal, his opinions fired rat-tat-tat at anyone and everyone. But he is also a doppelganger. Muslim and Jew are both outsiders in a borrowed America, exiles with nowhere to which they might return. They become good friends, sharing the little money they earn, chasing women. One afternoon they picnic at Waldon Pond, into which Kalaj urinates, a hilariously bald metaphor. Fearing he will be deported, Kalaj struggles to resist the "ersatz" allure of an America that might reject him. Our hero is torn between the camaraderie he feels for Kalaj and his desire to assimilate. Succumbing to Kalaj's uncompromising truths would mean rejecting the more nuanced hope that he might make a home in America without entirely belonging to it. Agent: Lynn Nesbit, Janklow & Nesbit. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Aciman's (Call Me by Your Name) narrator, a young Jewish man originally from Egypt, is a graduate student at Harvard in the mid 1970s. After failing exams he questions his goal of a career in academia. When he's not studying, he frequents Cambridge bars and restaurants that cater to a Middle Eastern clientele, and there he meets Kalaj, a man of Tunisian descent with a magnetic personality. With much in common, the two bond and spend the fall carousing in Cambridge and reminiscing about their pasts. Kalaj struggles to make ends meet as a cab driver and is engaged in ongoing battles with women, lawyers, and the federal immigration bureaucracy. He advises the narrator on, e.g., matters of romance, politics, and the shortcomings of American society. Eventually the narrator returns to the fold at Harvard, while Kalaj seems to be losing his struggle against deportation, and the two drift apart in this bittersweet tale of youth recalled. VERDICT Aciman probes the experience of immigrants and their dislocation and captures the youth and energy of his two main characters. He skillfully explores a side of Cambridge different from picturesque campus scenes and tourist highlights. [See Prepub Alert, 10/22/12.]-James Coan, Milne Lib., SUNY Oneonta (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Two immigrant outsiders hang out in cafes near Harvard. One vents, the other listens, in this third novel from the Egyptian-born Aciman (Eight White Nights, 2010, etc.). With the students gone, Cambridge in August is a sleepy place. But the nameless narrator does not have the wherewithal to leave town in 1977. He's a graduate, sweating over his dissertation on 17th-century literature, with last-chance exams looming. The 26-year-old is scraping by on library work and tutoring French. His background is sketchy: He's a Jew from Alexandria, Egypt by way of Paris; these autobiographical details are fleshed out in Aciman's well-received 1994 memoir Out of Egypt. He's drawn to the tiny Caf Algiers by its French-Arab flavor and finds it dominated by a new arrival, a beret-wearing guy in his 30s who holds forth in French about white Americans' addiction to "all things jumbo and ersatz." His rapid-fire delivery has earned him the nickname Kalaj, short for Kalashnikov. He's a Berber from a Mediterranean town in Tunisia, driving a cab while applying for a green card; that bid is in jeopardy because his American wife is divorcing him. Kalaj has an immediate appeal for the narrator (he is his id, his unexpressed anger), and the two become friends. The purpose of Kalaj's rants is to attract women; they are also a defense mechanism, should America reject him. His success with the ladies rubs off on the narrator. In short order, he beds a very rich Persian graduate student, a Romanian baby sitter and another rich graduate student, a white American, plus his always available neighbor Linda. These flings might have been more credible if Aciman had not placed their lovemaking off limits. As for Kalaj, this should have been his story, but he has not been developed into a picaresque hero, which is why Aciman shifts our attention back to his colorless narrator. A rather modest addition to immigrant experience literature.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.