Andre Aciman has been hailed as "the most exciting new fiction
writer of the twenty-first 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 Toibin). 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
seventeenth-century fiction, but when he meets a brash, charismatic
Arab cab driver in a Harvard Square cafe, 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 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 cafes 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."
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