Harvard Square

As I walked across campus this morning, I observed a lot of tense students with frowns on their faces.  This week has been the last week before finals.  I don't think the week has any particular name at the University of Washington, but at my school we called it "Dead Week."  At Harvard, apparently, it's called "Reading Week."

Dead Week is the week during which you try to learn all the things you should have studied earlier while, at the same time, mentally organizing and recalling to mind everything that you actually had studied.  For perhaps ninety percent of the students, it's a time of panic, self-recrimination, insomnia, and unhealthful consumption of caffeine.  We're all a little crazy.

I remember it well.  Decades later, it still occasionally disturbs my dreams.

Now imagine a Dead Week that lasts a year.  That soul-deadening concept provides the background for André Aciman's 2013 novel, Harvard Square. 

The narrator, like Aciman himself, is a French-speaking, Jewish native of Alexandria who -- with his family -- was expelled by the nationalist Egyptian government.  Like Aciman, he is doing his graduate work at Harvard.  Like Aciman, he has failed his "comprehensives" -- an exam that must be passed before one takes his orals for his Ph.D. -- and has only one more chance to get it right.

The novel opens on a hot muggy day in early July 1977.  The narrator's comprehensives, second try, loom ahead in January.  He is trying to read two or three books per day, trying to cover everything he can in his field of seventeenth century European literature.  He is impoverished, teaching courses as a T.A. and tutoring in Italian to keep his rent current and some food on the table.  He feels very foreign, very un-American, very un-Waspish, very un-patrician.  He doubts his ability.  He suspects he neither fits into Harvard's culture, nor is welcomed by its -- in the 1970s, at least -- preppy, upper class faculty and students.

I had the sinking feeling that ... I'd flunk my comprehensives again, and they'd find out what they probably suspected all along: that I was a fraud, that I was never cut out to be a teacher, much less a scholar; that I had been a bad investment from the get-go; that I was the black sheep, the rotten apple, the bad seed; that I'd be known as the imposter who'd hustled his way into Harvard and was let go in the nick of time.

Moreover, troubling his ability to focus on Pascal and Cervantes, he is desperate for women, and he longs for a mythical Mediterranean world, for a lost Alexandria to which he can never return.

Harvard Square is a small square and a district immediately adjacent to the university.  The narrator tells us that in the 1970s, it was a grittier and much less touristy area than it is now.  He begins escaping his tiny apartment and doing his reading in tiny cafés in the area.  It's in the Café Algiers that he meets his soul-mate -- the man they call Kalishnikov, a Tunisian cab driver who spits out French like an automatic rifle, and whose name his friends shorten to "Kalaj."

The two men -- the Harvard graduate student of seventeenth century literature and the Tunisian cab driver who lacks a green card -- hit it off.  Kalaj berates his friend for his passivity, his overthinking every social situation, his inability to live in the present and go with the flow.  They share a love of their Mediterranean homelands, and of their adopted French culture.  Kalaj helps his friend learn to live, to make friends, to enjoy -- however tentatively -- life.  The narrator also learns from Kalaj how to waste precious time.

Aciman, of course, is a Proust scholar.  All his stories and essays deal, in one way or another, with our memories and with with the manner in which those memories shape our lives.  In Harvard Square, both men are deeply drawn by nostalgia for past worlds that never really existed, or never existed as now recalled. 

The novel offers many themes, and can be understood on many levels.  The narrator gradually realizes that he has never allowed himself to open up -- not to the various women he has slept with, not to his few friends.  For whatever reason, he puts up walls, he loses interest, he becomes uncomfortable when a relationship or friendship becomes too demanding.  Kalaj was his opposite:

I was shifty, he was up-front.  I never raised my voice; he was the loudest man on Harvard Square.  I was cramped, cautious, diffident; he was reckless and brutal, a tinder box.  He spoke his mind.  Mine was a vault.  He was in-your-face; I waited till your back was turned.  He stood for nothing, took no prisoners, lambasted everyone.  I tolerated everybody without loving a single one. ... He was new to the States but had managed to speak to almost everyone in Cambridge; I'd been a graduate student for four years at Harvard but went entire days that summer without a soul to turn to.

He eventually realizes that he needs to choose -- the jovial, Mediterranean, live-for-the-minute world of his friend Kalaj, the world he recalls from his Alexandria youth and a world in which he now feels, at times, alive -- or the glittering world Harvard offers him.   Fully understanding what he's doing, he betrays Kalaj as he has betrayed each of his girlfriends -- silently and passively.  He pulls back.  He stops hanging out.  He stops being home when Kalaj comes around.  Kalaj understands all too well; others have treated him the same way.  But Kalaj had come to believe that his shy Harvard friend was different, a true friend. 

Immigration catches up, finally, with Kalaj, and he is deported.  The narrator can't tolerate the emotions that would be involved in bidding Kalaj goodbye.  He avoids Kalaj's attempt to see him one last time, knowing that his behavior is something for which he'll never forgive himself.

"Dead Week" makes us all a little crazy.

He never hears from Kalaj again.  He passes his comprehensives.