Description
Book SynopsisFor a long time the identity of the author who used the pseudonym 'Kurban Said' to write Ali and Nino, published in Vienna in 1937, has been surrounded by controversy. Was it possible that the Austrian countess who signed the original publishing contract, Baroness Elfriede Ehrenfels, could have written a novel that displays such extraordinary insight into the atmosphere of pre-First World War Baku and intimate knowledge of Muslim culture? Recent research seems to prove, once and for all, that her friend Lev Nussimbaum, a Jew who had escaped Azerbaijan during the Russian Revolution and settled in Berlin, was the real 'Kurban Said'.
Born in Baku in 1905, Nussimbaum had a passion for the Orient, and in his youth, converted to Islam. A flamboyant in the literary world of 1920s Berlin, he fled from Nazi Germany to Austria. Having then gone on to Italy, he ended up under house arrest in Positano, where he died of a rare blood disease in 1942.
The outbreak of the Secon
Trade Review
Its beauty and power and the sheer pleasure that it gives are indestructible * Sunday Times *
Poignant and beautiful...alive with a vividly unique vision of colliding cultures and enduring love * The Times *
A blazing masterpiece... I cannot think of so moving a love story in modern fiction * Washington Star *
One feels as if one had dug up buried treasure...an epic cultural change that seems more immediate than this morning's headlines... An extraordinary novel * New York Times *
A beautiful novel -- Paul Theroux
