The Orientalist: In Search of a Man Caught Between East and West

by TomReiss (Author)

• New

  Paperback
  2006

  $15.78

  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.

• Used

  Hardcover
  2005

  $3.30

  The Orientalist is the extraordinary story of a Jewish man's passion for the Arab world as political extremism swept Europe. Part Quest for Corvo, part Seven Pillars of Wisdom, it unravels the mysterious life of Lev Nussimbaum, a man born on the border of Europe and Persia, just as Revolution began to redraw the map. To read this book is to wander into a fabulous and forgotten civilisation, buried for ever by the forces of Naziism and Bolshevism. Tom Reiss first came across Nussimbaum when he went to the ex-USSR to research Russia's oil reserves, and discovered a novel instead. Ali and Nino is a captivating love story set in the glamorous city of Baku, Azerbaijan's capital, and a turn-of-the-century monument to cosmopolitanism and the huge wealth generated by Russia's black gold. The novel changed the way Reiss looked at East-West relations, but who was Kurban Said, its supposed author? And why had he and his book faded into obscurity? A chance encounter suggested to Reiss that Said was a pseudonym for Nussimbaum, but finding Lev was not so easy. For five years, Reiss tracked Nussimbaum's protean identity 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 fascinating story he tells is one of self-aggrandisement and willing deception, but also of political and religious tolerance, and the romantic dream of a universal brotherhood.