The Orientalist unravels the mysterious life of a man born on the border between West & 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, & discovered a novel instead. Written on the eve of the Second World War, Ali & 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? & 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, & an exile in Berlin as bestselling author & self-proclaimed Muslim prince. The result is a thoroughly unexpected picture of the twentieth-century
- of the origins of our ideas about race & religious self-definition, & of the roots of modern fanaticism.