Tom Reiss: The Orientalist, Kartoniert / Broschiert

Kurzbeschreibung

Die ungewöhnliche und extraordinäre Geschichte des Lev Nussimbaum, Autor des Bestsellers Ali und Nino, eines Mannes, der, an der Grenze zwischen Ost und West geboren, sich ein Leben lang mit der (geliebten) arabischen Welt auseinandersetzen wird. An extraordinary and hugely topical story of a Jewish man's passion for the Arab world, which was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize.

Rezension

"Wonderfully compelling... Deeply moving" Sunday Times 20050626

Klappentext

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.