The orientalist tom reiss

  • A thrilling page-turner of epic proportions,

    • The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life

    May 9,
    The Orientalist is, in the end, the story of one man’s accidental obsessive search for another man’s story. While in Baku (present day capital of Azerbaijan) writing a story about the revival of the oil business, Tom Reiss is handed a copy of Ali and Nino by a person called “Kurban Said,” and told that this book is both the Azeri “national novel” and the best introduction to the city he could possibly have. Soon, he finds that there is a huge controversy over the identity of the author- despite the novel’s cultural importance, no one seems to really know who this “Kurban Said,” was for sure, and everyone wants to claim him for one of their own. He becomes fascinated with the mystery and embarks on a whirlwind quest to find out just who this man was.

    The author identifies the author of the novel as a man born to the name of Lev Nissumbaum, born on October 17, (Alert: history buffs, you might have reason to know this date) in Baku, Tiflis, or “noplace,” depending on the version of his birth story that you believe. Lev’s own version of his birth (found in his deathbed notebooks) essentially gives the framework of his entire life, so I will reproduce a part of it here:

    “Born in…? Already here the problematic nature of my existence begins. Most people can name a house or at least a place where they were born… I was born during the first Russian railroad strike in the middle of the Russian steppes between Europe and Asia, when my mother was returning from Zurich, the seat of the Russian revolutionaries, to Baku, the seat of our family. On the day of my birth, the czar proclaimed his manifesto in which he granted the Russians a political constitution. On the day of my arrival in Baku the city was engulfed in the flames of Revolution, and the slaughtering of the mob…So began my existence. Father: an industrial magnate in the oil industry; mother: a radical revolutionary.”

    The story o

    The Orientalist

    Part history, part cultural biography, and part literary mystery, The Orientalist traces the life of Lev Nussimbaum, a Jew who transformed himself into a Muslim prince and became a best-selling author in Nazi Germany. Tom Reiss first came across Nussimbaum when he went to the ex-USSR to research Russia's oil reserves, 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 Kurban Said, its supposed author? And why did he and his book fade into obscurity? For five years, Reiss tracked Said'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 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.

    First published:
    Published by:
    Chatto and Windus
    Length:
    Hardcover pages

    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.

    Wonderfully compelling Deeply moving

    A wonderous tale, beautifully toldmesmerising, poignant and almost incredible

    Meticulous and fascinating Inspiring reading

    Extraordinary on many counts It has taken the tireless detective work of Tom Reiss to uncover the real Lev Nussimbaum

    A highly entertaining biography of a very unusual person

    An extraordinary tale of reinvention

    Funny, exactly observed and humane

    A highly enjoyable mingling of scholarship and sleuthing that elegantly solves the puzzle of one of the Twentieth Century's most mysterious writers

    A remarkable story of East meeting West, and the fantastic historical figure who stood astride both worlds, during an almost equally fantastic moment in time. This is history and biography that reads like a great novel

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