Publisher's Synopsis
An extraordinary and hugely topical story of a Jewish man's passion for the Arab world. 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 between West and East, just as Revolution began to redraw the map. 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, and a turn-of-the-century monument to the huge wealth generated by Russia's black gold. 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. He read secret police records, love letters, diaries and deathbed manuscripts, and visited ten countries. In piecing together the fragments of this deliberately obscured life, Reiss also brings to light a series of shadowy worlds - of European pan-Islamists, nihilist assassins, anti-Nazi book smugglers, Baku oil barons, Jewish Orientalists - that have been virtually forgotten. 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 fantaticism.
