Book description
The Orientalist unravels the mysterious life of a man born on the
border between West and East, a Jewish man with a passion for the Arab world.
Tom Reiss first came across the man who called himself 'Kurban Said'
when he went to the ex-USSR to research the oil business on the
Caspian Sea, and discovered a novel instead. Written on the eve of the
Second World War, Ali and Nino is a captivating love story set
in the glamorous city of Baku, Azerbaijan's capital. The novel's
depiction of a lost cosmopolitan society is enthralling, but equally
intriguing is the identity of the man who wrote it. Who was its
supposed author? And why was he so forgotten that no one could agree
on the simplest facts about him?
For five years, Reiss tracked Lev Nussimbaum, alias Kurban Said,
from a wealthy Jewish childhood in Baku, to a romantic adolescence in
Persia on the run from the Bolsheviks, and an exile in Berlin as
bestselling author and self-proclaimed Muslim prince. The result is a
thoroughly unexpected picture of the twentieth-century - of the
origins of our ideas about race and religious self-definition, and of
the roots of modern fanaticism.
Born in 1964, Tom Reiss is an American author and journalist who
lives in New York. He is the author of
The Orientalist
, an acclaimed biography of Lev Nussimbaum (aka Kurban Said) which was
shortlisted for the 2006 Samuel Johnson Prize; and
The Black Count
, a book about the real Count of Monte Christo.
