The Orientalist
  • Published: 1 July 2010
  • ISBN: 9781407053820
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 480
Categories:

The Orientalist

In Search of a Man caught between East and West

Formats & editions
EBook
1 Jul 2010
Paperback
1 Sep 2006
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An extraordinary and hugely topical story of a Jewish man's passion for the Arab world, which was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize.

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.
  • Published: 1 July 2010
  • ISBN: 9781407053820
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 480
Categories:

About the author

Tom Reiss

Tom Reiss has written about politics and culture in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, and elsewhere.

portrait photo of Tom Reiss

Also by Tom Reiss

The Black Count
See all

Praise for The Orientalist

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

Paul Theroux

A highly entertaining biography of a very unusual person

Literary Review

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

Kevin Baker, author of Paradise Alley

A wonderous tale, beautifully told...mesmerising, poignant and almost incredible

New York Times

An extraordinary tale of reinvention

Guardian

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

Sunday Times

Funny, exactly observed and humane

Daily Telegraph

He has a sharp eye for incongruities, and peppers the book with entertaining footnotes

Sunday Telegraph

Meticulous and fascinating... Inspiring reading

Spectator

Wonderfully compelling... Deeply moving

Sunday Times
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