Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(38)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

Fantastic in both senses of the word, this biography of Kurban Said--or should I say Essad Bey or Lev Nussimbaum?-is impossible to put down. The book's subtitle is "Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life," but fortunately much of the subject's life remains tantalizingly unexplained. Author Tom Riess does a masterly job following Lev's trail, but how nice it is to know that even with the marvels of the internet, the hard work of a very dedicated writer, and the discovery of deathbed papers, so many details of a life lived completely in the 20th century and in the spotlight on several continents can remain a mystery.

So who is this book about? As Kurban Said, he was perhaps the author of "Ali and Nino," the story of love between a Muslim boy and a Christian girl set in the central Asian city of Baku just before the Russian Revolution. It has never been out of print since its publication in the 1930s and remains very popular in any number of languages. As Essad Bey he was the author of biographies of Stalin and Nicholas II and a book on the Azerbaijani oil industry. He was invited to be Mussolini's official biographer. His socialite wife claimed not to know who he really was, and their divorce made the tabloids. As Lev Nussimbaum he spent his life fleeing one hideous revolution after another, but still managed to die of natural causes. You couldn't make this stuff up.

Reiss is a fluid, vivid writer who captures the mystery, excitement, and plain oddness of this subject's life. He places Lev's story (he calls his subject Lev) brilliantly within its historic context, and his depiction of the Russian revolution in central Asia is terrific. This author is a guy who jumped at every chance to sift though trunks of crumbling correspondence ignored for decades in the storage rooms of country houses, and, in one case, willingly sang selections from popular musicals for an ancient aristocrat who allowed him to look through stacks of her family's letters. If anyone is up to recording Lev's amazing life, Tom Reiss is it.

I was sorry when "The Orientalist" ended. I look forward to whatever mystery Tom Reiss takes on next.

This is simply the best book I have had the good fortune to read in quite some time, in fact years. It ranks better than the five stars I can award, and it is indeed a work of art...a masterpiece. Reiss has conceived a book which reads like a novel, has the expansiveness of a travelogue, and a concise history of both the eastern and western worlds from the turn of the 20th century to the rise of Hitler.

We visit many countries here...Azerbaijan, Persia, the old Soviet Muslim republics, Russia, Germany, Italy, France and more. However much seems to center on the Ottoman Empire and it's influence on all of the other cultures between 1905 and the thirties. We are also priviledged to entertain first hand information on the Cossacks, the Russian Revolution, the Spartacist Revolt, and the rise of Hitler and Mussolini. We meet and are exposed to the thoughts and lives of so many famous people of the era.

The expanse of this book and the information contained within is a goldmine for both historians and literary types. It offered me so many opportunities to leave the book and to explore so many other books that it was definitely worth reading for just that. The main character, who went through more incarnations than Madonna and Michael Jackson combined, is absolutely compelling.

I could not in any way wish to obtain more from any book.

In this gripping account of an Azeri Jewish writer named Lev Nussimbaum who reinvented himself as a Muslim Caucasian prince named Esad Bey and became the toast of Weimar Berlin, Tom Reiss sketches a parallel history of Europe and Asia between the wars.

Nussimbaum was both a walking clash of civilizations and a talented writer who left us one great romantic novel, Ali and Nino, the story of a doomed love affair between a Muslim boy and a Christian girl set in Baku during the final years of World War I. Nussimbaum himself came of age in Baku, a cosmopolitan, oil-fuelled boomtown poised between Christian Europe and Islamic West Asia.

To the people of this region, history itself must have seemed to be dissolving along with the Romanov and Ottoman Empires. It was the perfect era for a master shape changer whose own biography is no less fantastical than those of his characters. After a comfortable childhood in Baku, where his father made his fortune in the oil industry, Nussimbaum spent the remainder of his brief life as a stateless refugee. Reiss follows the young writer from Baku to Iran, Istanbul, Germany, Austria, the United States and finally the resort town of Positano on the Italian Amalfi coast, where Nussimbaum died penniless and alone after experiencing international literary celebrity while still in his twenties.

Reiss definitively solves the 80-year mystery of Esad Bey's identity. His intimate, ironic portrait turns many histories on their heads, not least the beginnings of Soviet communism and German fascism. But in the end, "The Orientalist" is a tragic story of one man's doomed effort to transcend history. Like some Hegelian surfer dude, Nussimbaum was ultimately crushed by the same wave that had carried him to stardom.

Who was "Kurban Said"? This was maybe not the most pressing question in my life before I began reading this scholarly yet utterly readable and fascinating book. But the question at the heartv of the book soon became a deeply meaningful, many-layered one. It not only asked about the mysterious real life-- lives? -- behind the name, but somehow it also began to ask something (or say something) important about the forces that caused the twentieth century to go as it did.

A pretty powerful question, as it turns out! For a proper answer, every page of Reiss's gorgeous, plaintive, and meticulously researched book is required. And was enjoyed.(Reiss can be quite amusing as well.)

In the heartbreaking end, Reiss leaves no doubt about the strangeness and the complexity of things: world events, the human psyche, etc.
That's on one hand.On the other, he leaves no ounce of doubt about the true identity of Kurban Said either. He even gives him the last word.A very sad end to the really amazing story of a man who tuly was a victim of history, and then became a victim of himself.

The story of Lev Nussinbaum--or is it Essad Bay--is much more than the biography of one man. Through his one enigmatic character, ___ is able to explore entire cultures and literally hundred years of complex history in one of the most conflicted regions in the world. In this way, ___ uses Nussinbaum as a window into issues and events ranging from the Eastern European oil boom to insitutionalized racism and, yes, even into love. Despite the fact that the window is often cloudy--due to Lev's unrelenting travels and embellishments--I felt as though I was given a crystal clear view of a society I know almost nothing about. I learned more about European history than in any Western Civilization class, I was more horrified by the atrocities committed by almost every party than I have in any WWI or WWII movie and I ventured deeper into the recesses of human behavior than any university Psychology professor has ever been able to take me. This book is an absolute success precisely because it refuses to be constrained to only one man. And it works especially well because Nussinbaum the Chameleon, also refused to be only one person.

This is one of the most absorbing books I've read in a long time. Not only is it a suspenseful, globetrotting investigation of a relatively unknown writer who penned the grievously underappreciated novel "Ali and Nino," but it is a thoughtful study of area of the world about which Americans know very little. This is an area of the world where the first Christian nation was established; where Christians lived harmoniously with Jews and Moslems.

This book by Tom Reiss is a remarkable synthesis of social and historical topics that can help us understand better the world we live in today.

This account of a man who lived a varied, varying life is well foretold by the subtitle. Essentially a story of one way to combat religous discrimination, it evolves into a strange, mysterious series of events where a Jew passes for Muslim. His life treks Asia Minor and Europe for the first half of the 20th century and the author captures it brilliantly. The best nonfiction I read this past year.

I enjoyed reading "Ali and Nino" by Kurban Said but not nearly as much as The Orientalist of Tom Reiss, a magnificent saga told in an attempt to decipher the enigmatic author of Ali and Nino. His father, originally from the Pale and would-be oil baron, his mother, a salon revolutionary who on several occasions had helped the Pockmarked One alias the Seminarist better known as Joseph Djugashvili Stalin are the dominant figures of his childhood. Tracking young Lev Nussimbaum and his father's flight from Muslim Azerbaijan when the red army marched into oil-rich Baku, through their travails in Christian Georgia to wind up in 1921 in Istanbul after crossing the Caspian aboard an Italian liner, the Cleopatra, only sets the pace for what lies ahead in this amazing story. Indeed, "after a few weeks among the mosques and the nightclubs (of Istanbul) the Nussimbaums were on the move again, "this time to Berlin by way of Rome and Paris, the émigrés capital of Europe". Reiss' reconstruction of Nussimbaum's sojourn in Berlin is History as it should be taught. "They had escaped one (revolution, the Russian) and now it seemed they were rolling right back into another." Ever heard of Liebknecht (the German Lenin), Luxembourg, General Ludendorff, Field Marshal Hindenburg or the Freikorps? They are all there. Reiss' vivid description of the last gasps of the second Reich is simply superb. And what about the émigré life in Weimar Berlin? Amidst the likes of Nabokov, Chagall, Voronov, Pasternak, Nussimbaum caught up with his orientalism and enrolled at the Seminar for Oriental Studies at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität under the name Essad Bey Nousimbaoum from Georgia ("the inconvenient detail that Lev had not graduated from high school was not mentioned.")
In August 1922 he came full circle and converted to Islam at the Turkish embassy in Berlin. He became a founding member of the Islamic community in Berlin and of Islamia, its affiliated student corps. At the age of 24 Essad Bey published his first book and when he died twelve years later he would have written fourteen more books, not counting Ali and Nino, this time by Kurban Saïd! His biographies of Stalin and of Mohammad became international best-sellers. Blood and Oil in the Orient was hailed in many European capitals but also derided as "one of the most miserable publications of recent years." The offending passage is Lev's description of the massacres that took place in Baku after it fell to Turkish-German troops in 1918. These passages enraged refugee Muslim nationalists and Germans Army officers alike who lashed out against the Kievan Jew and story swindler. The controversy only made Lev-Essad famous who was now working on biographies of Lenin, Ataturk, Reza-Shah and... former U.S. president Warren Harding.
The story goes on and on, unabated, and Reiss' prose and handling of his thorough research makes this book a history page-turner. We did not mention Nussimbaum's bout with Mussolini or Reiss' version of Hitler's ascent to power. In 1933 the newly-wed Lev, Erika and retinue boarded the Vulcania, bound for New-York. But let us skip this trip and mention that an Austrian Dictionary has Essad Bey/Kurban Saïd as an Israeli officer in the Negev Desert!
My recommendation is: read the book. I have very much liked Dalrymple's From the Holy Mountain, Goodwin's Lords of the Horizon, and now The Orientalist by Tom Reiss.

I knew very little about the fascinating pre and post World War I era that is so very well illuminated in this book, and about how the major Empires of Europe all collapsed in a few years. The life of the mysterious lead character, Essad Bey (with numerous aliases!) held me spellbound - in an earlier Hollwyood era, he would have been portrayed on the screen by Peter Lorre, as in a Bogart movie. All in all, this book is a fabulous recreation of some really weird times in history -- (almost as weird as today!) Literally could not put the book down and await Tom Reiss' next book eagerly.

Bill Sheldon, Glenview IL

I envy Tom Reiss his gifts as a writer. Truly the fairies must have been out in full attendance at his birth, leaving behind in their wake so many of the important things one really needs to pull off a task of such magnitude. One fairy must have left little Tom the ability to research not only deeply, but laterally, so that we see no event without its full context, both historically and culturally. Another talent is the ability to summon up words andimages to bring whatever it is you're writing about to life, like a magic wand shedding light on its subject. Here we find out about the unhappy author Kurban Said, famous for a single novel, the heartbreaking romance ALI AND NINO, through the evidence of the things he touched and the things and people he left behind.

Reiss is a subjective writer, nearly a poet, as well as an objective one; he seems to have all of 20th century history at his fingertips. He must have used many charts just to keep track of the shifting borders and names of nations that have changed in our crazy century. Sometimes you feel that the thread of the narrative--Lev Nussimbaum himself--is not as important as the cultural movements he participated in, or those he fled. Sometimes we lose sight of Lev, a disappearing subject, behind the immense project of discerning who is resisting Communism. who is succumbing to nationalism, who is promoting modernism. But even in his ghostly manifestation, Kurban Said leaves his traces, and ALI AND NINO will always be one of those books that, once you've read it, you'll be wondering about the interior life of the man who wrote it.

THE ORIENTALIST is the product of some amazing encounters Reiss had, and he presents these with the glee and the awareness of magic we associate with a biographer like Richard Holmes. Reiss has erased Coleridge's distinction between "fancy" and "imagination" in this important work of cultural history.