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
…André Aciman's third novel (and best so far)…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…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, drawing-room 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.
The New York Times Book Review - Clancy Martin
…a tale of…an immigrant's painful decision to assimilate into a culture that rewards reinvention…Harvard Square is a plaintive love letter to displaced, wandering people, to anyone who longs for home and reaches unwisely for the hand of a fellow wanderer…It's an old story for Americans, but worth telling again when it's told this well: Every act of immigration is also an act of betrayal.
The Washington Post - Ron Charles
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 Café 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.)
"A paced, enjoyable read…. The book is hard to put down."
The Daily Beast - G. Clay Whittaker
"Wonderful, riveting.… Beautifully written…. It captures the tenderness and evanescence of youth and ambition."
PopMatters - Farisa Khalid
"Slyly comic…Touching and beautifully written."
New York Times - Charles McGrath
"Entertaining and moving…. Aciman writes a vigorous, muscular prose that is as seductive as his characters."
Chicago Tribune - Julia Klein
"Powerful… As in so many classic novels before it, Harvard Square 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."
"Entertaining and moving….Aciman writes a vigorous, muscular prose that is as seductive as his characters."
Chicago Tribune - Julia M. Klein
"A plaintive love letter to displaced, wandering people, to anyone who longs for home and reaches unwisely for the hand of a fellow wanderer."
"Beautifully done [and] deeply satisfying."
Los Angeles Review of Books - Jillian Keenan
"An illuminating character study and poignant meditation on the twin trials of how to fit in and how to be loved."
San Francisco Chronicle - Malcom Forbes
"Timely, affecting…Quietly tragic."
"[Aciman's] best so far…an existentialist adventure worthy of Kerouac."
"So candid, so penetrating and so beautifully written that it can make you feel cut open, emotionally exposed."
Wall Street Journal - Sam Sacks
"Harvard Square sings as a portrait of a fleeting friendship, revealing how platonic closeness can have a romantic tinge as well."
Minneapolis Star Tribune - Mark Athitakis
"Brilliant…A novel of education and isolation, sad and funny and sure to provoke nostalgia for anyone’s college years."
The Millions - Jessica Freeman-Slade
"Harvard Square is 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."
Boston Globe - Richard Eder
"Andre Aciman has captured the inner life of exile, what it’s like to stand in one place and be reminded of another, to long for that other place, even knowing it no longer exits."
The Jewish Week - Sandee Brawarsky
"Aciman tackles Big Ideas by observing the smallest, most intimate gestures of two people and letting them talk—and his characters talk beautifully."
Entertainment Weekly - Stephan Lee
Themes of alienation, class, rejection, and nostalgia run deep in this semi-autobiographical novel. A transplanted Egyptian Jew accompanies his son to Cambridge and reminisces about his own time at Harvard and the unlikely friendship he formed with a bombastic Muslim émigré from Tunisia during the summer of 1977. The two men were opposites in every imaginable way, yet they developed a brief, meaningful bond. Well suited to the young protagonist, Sanjiv Jhaveri’s voice is less convincing as the middle-aged protagonist. Jhaveri develops a strong portrayal of the outgoing Tunisian as he opines on everyone and everything. The author’s keen observations fuse with Jhaveri’s flowing voice for a touching look at the mixed emotions many newcomers experience in America. M.L.R. © AudioFile 2013, Portland, Maine
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 Café 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.
