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    Harvard Square: A Novel
    Unavailable
    Harvard Square: A Novel
    Unavailable
    Harvard Square: A Novel
    Audiobook9 hours

    Harvard Square: A Novel

    Written by André Aciman

    Narrated by Sanjiv Jhaveri

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    André Aciman has been hailed as "the most exciting fiction writer of the 21st century" (New York magazine), a "brilliant chronicler of the disconnect...between who we are and who we wish we might have been" (Wall Street Journal), and a writer of "fiction at its most supremely interesting" (Colm Tóibín). Now, with his third and most ambitious novel, Aciman delivers an elegant and powerful tale of the wages of assimilation - a moving story of an immigrant’s remembered youth and the nearly forgotten costs and sacrifices of becoming an American.

    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 17th-century fiction, but when he meets a brash, charismatic Arab cab driver in a Harvard Square café, everything changes. 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 friend’s magnetism, and before long he begins to neglect his studies and live a double life: one in the rarefied world of Harvard, the other as an exile with Kalaj on the streets of Cambridge. Together they carouse the bars and cafés 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.

    Harvard Square 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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrilliance Audio
    Release dateApr 8, 2013
    ISBN9781480517363
    Unavailable
    Harvard Square: A Novel
    Author

    André Aciman

    André Aciman (Alejandría, Egipto, 1951), se trasladó a vivir a Italia con sus padres a los quince años y más tarde se afincaron en Nueva York. Allí se graduó en lengua inglesa en el Lehman College y obtuvo un doctorado en literatura comparada en la Universidad de Harvard. Es profesor de literatura comparada e imparte clases sobre la obra de Proust en el Graduate Center de la City University de Nueva York, donde dirige el Writers’ Institute. También ha impartido clases de escritura creativa en la Universidad de Nueva York y de literatura francesa en la Universidad de Princeton. Es el autor de las novelas Llámame por tu nombre y Ocho noches blancas, de las memorias Out of Egypt (Premio Whiting Writers’) y de los ensayos False Papers: Essays on Exile and Memory y Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere; además es el editor de The Proust Project. Vive en Nueva York.

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    Reviews for Harvard Square

    3.5/5

    48 ratings4 reviews

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    • 2/5
      Aciman's writing style kept me engaged, but whenever I put the book down I thought, why am I reading this? The framing device was silly -- was the narrator telling his son about all of his sexual escapades and the horrible way he treated women? -- and the narrator often came off as whiny. I thought the book captured the fickleness of a young commitment-phobic man well, and it was interesting to read about a male rather than female gold digger. Kalaj's complexity as a character was definitely the strong point, and made the book almost worth reading, but overall, I found it to be a forgettable read.
    • 2/5
      I loved Call Me by Your Name and Eight White Nights, but Harvard Square just didn't do it for me. The writing here was more pedestrian; the plot, such as it was, much more plodding; and I had no interest in the characters - and, in fact, as soon as I realized Kalaj, whom I grew to detest, was going to be the centerpiece of the book, I began skimming, and finally gave up altogether.
    • 4/5
      Friendship, loyalty, the feeling of belonging, and how tenuous these concepts are in reality for the faint at heart, are central to Andre Aciman's latest novel, Harvard Square.In the summer of 1977, a Jewish graduate student at Harvard from Alexandria, Egypt, who will never go home, is hit by the summer doldrums. He has failed his comprehensives, has one more chance to pass them and needs to read like a fiend all summer. So of course he would rather be doing anything else.Drawn to a cafe that reminds him of home, he meets a loud, abusive Tunisian Arab who commands the attention of everyone around, especially the women. Kalaj is a cabdriver, but he knows more about many things than just about everyone else. And doesn't mind telling them so.He's also a performance artist who adores women; his every public move is calculated to draw their attention and flirt until they go off together. Kalaj is mesmerizing to our narrator.Their acquaintance becomes a friendship of opposites, an academic and cabdriver, Jew and Arab, quiet and boisterous, wavering and steadfast, one with a green card and the other without.The themes in Aciman's story are well-served by the story of the two young men at turning points in their lives. The academic does not turn his back on Harvard, only on people. Kalaj, after being so vigorously a critic of the ersatz United States and everything it stands for, falls whole-heartedly when he is accepted into the narrator's world.Aciman does at least as much, if not more, tell rather than show in his story, but with a purpose. The emotions, the observations, the reflections are at the heart of what Aciman's narrator is trying to recapture in the story of that long-ago summer. It's told as a flashback, with the endpieces being the older man bringing his son to Harvard during the child's college search. The narrator is searching to feel all those feelings again as much as he is weaving a narrative.Aciman does not name his narrator. This helps reinforce the universal human qualities of his narrator, who spends that summer both knowing how fortunate he is to be at Harvard studying what he wants, while also regretting that he can't have other kinds of lives as well. His life, even when he makes choices, is not a life like the one lived by Kalaj, who lives for the moment, who lives each moment to the fullest, who is larger than life to everyone.Aciman does a wonderful job of capturing that feeling of being in a place where you feel you will be unmasked as a fraud, that everyone will know you don't really belong there, and how empowering it feels to get away with any slight action that makes it look like you do belong. This works as well for the Harvard academic setting as it does for an ex-pat living in a foreign country. Another aspect of the novel that worked well was that feeling of befriending someone as magnetic as Kalaj. It may initially feel like being on top of the world that such a strong personality wants to spend time with you. But does it feel the same after you realize that friend has sucked up all the oxygen in the world? What to do if you are both proud and ashamed of knowing such a person? A book that leads to wondering about such things is one well worth spending time in.
    • 5/5
      This book took me back to my own summers living in a college town. It beautifully captured the feel, the smell, the taste of long ago summers and odd friendships that will never be forgotten.