Ali and Nino: A Love Story | Kurban Said

Ali and Nino: A Love Story | Kurban Said | A hidden gem!

books:

Ali and Nino: A Lo...

	Ali and Nino: A Love Story Kurban Said Anchor, 2000 - 288 pages average customer review:based on 40 reviews view larger image
	for more information click here

highly recommended

First published in Vienna in 1937, this classic story of romance and adventure has been compared to Dr. Zhivago and Romeo and Juliet. Its mysterious author was recently the subject of a feature article in the New Yorker, which has inspired a forthcoming biography. Out of print for nearly three decades until the hardcover re-release last year, Ali and Nino is Kurban Said's masterpiece. It is a captivating novel as evocative of the exotic desert landscape as it is of the passion between two people pulled apart by culture, religion, and war.

It is the eve of World War I in Baku, Azerbaijan, a city on the edge of the Caspian Sea, poised precariously between east and west. Ali Khan Shirvanshir, a Muslim schoolboy from a proud, aristocratic family, has fallen in love with the beautiful and enigmatic Nino Kipiani, a Christian girl with distinctly European sensibilities. To be together they must overcome blood feud and scandal, attempt a daring horseback rescue, and travel from the bustling street of oil-boom Baku, through starkly beautiful deserts and remote mountain villages, to the opulent palace of Ali's uncle in neighboring Persia. Ultimately the lovers are drawn back to Baku, but when war threatens their future, Ali is forced to choose between his loyalty to the beliefs of his Asian ancestors and his profound devotion to Nino. Combining the exotic fascination of a tale told by Scheherazade with the range and magnificence of an epic, Ali and Nino is a timeless classic of love in the face of war.

for more information click here

Great story!

After reading "The Orientalist" I just had to follow up with Ali and Nino. I have to agree, it's a masterpiece. It's an epic love story. It's a bit of a history lesson. And it gives a lot of sympathetic insight into cultures that I have very little sympathy towards.

Ali's extreme passions are in many ways admirable, with consequences that are unpredictable in the short term but inevitable in the long term. In that respect I think you get significant understanding of the bizarrre, fatalistic outlook of Shiism from Ali's story, and a wonderfully human-scale view of Eastern and Western cultures crashing together. The terrible destruction of Baku by competing factions reads like a template of so many similar events to come in the century to follow. The scenes of Iran in the last stages of the Qajars' decay are utterly fascinating. All of the main characters seem so profoundly and honestly rooted in their respective cultures by an author who is deeply aware of and appreciative of those cultures, yet in no way blind to their respective faults.

I would recommend you read "Ali and Nino" before reading "the Orientalist," but only because I think it will be all the more fascinating to read Lev Nussimbaum's astonishing life story in light of his greatest work rather than the other way around. But if you're coming at it from having just read "The Orientalist," well, that certainly won't take anything away from the power of "Ali and Nino."

for more information click here

A hidden gem!

An exellent book so well written it is such a shame it is still little known.

Kurban Said otherwise known as Essad Bey was an Azeri Jew who converted to Shia Islam, wrote a number of novels (and a biography of Muhammad under the name Essad Bey) lived in Russia for a time before living out the rest of his days in Central Europe. His life reflects much of the characters he wrote about and the complex world they lived in.

The novel is a love story between Ali an Azeri Shia of a noble family and Nino a Georgian christian. The story surrounds their lives growing up in the turbluant world leading up to World War 1. How their love brought them together but their cultures tore them apart.

The reason I put a brief biography of the author is that to know him is to understand how he could write with such insight into the various cultures of the Caucuses both Christian and Muslim. His insights into the Shia rituals such as Ashura, the culture of Iran and the hopeless decline of the Persian empre.

While the writer covers this so well I feel at times he does go a little overboard on the wole east Vs west and the whole emphasis on Christian Nino seeing Ali as some kind of 'romantic barbarian' is a little silly. The Georgian people are proud of their own wild rustic culture and the Persians are hardly some kind of Bedowin desert people.

Still, this book realy does capture the time so well, in a maner that other writers on that most beautiful of lands such as Tolstoy and Pushkin would be proud.

for more information click here

A beautifully written book, magical and touching

Kurban Said: `Ali and Nino: A Love Story'

This is a beautifully written book, magical and touching, a lovely novel, unique and thrilling. I came to read it after having read Tom Reiss's `The Orientalist', a brilliant investigation of the life and times of the author, Lev Nussimbaum (aka Kurban Said and Essad Bey). This is a `love story' - a story of devotion that transcends religious and cultural differences - but it by no means a conventional tale. Set in Azerbaijan at the time of the first world war, it is a wonderfully realised recreation of an historical period, not intended to be an exhaustive account - this is not `War and Peace' - but rather an artfully accomplished miniature, a slender work, moving, memorable, and evocative. Reading Tom Reiss's work enables a reader to understand where the vision of these characters and their circumstances came from, in the life, background, experience and mind of the author. But the novel can be read, of course, on its own, as the gentle and tender re-creation of two people, Ali and Nino, who may not have existed, but who very well could have done. These two people - who they are; what they think; how they speak - and their relationship - amusing; affecting; genuine - will be attractive companions, profoundly memorable, for any reader inclined to go on a journey with them, making a trip to a far-off time and place, discovering people we don't quite recognise but would surely have been very fortunate to get to know.

If this book becomes Lev Nussimbaum's principal legacy, it is a gift he leaves behind to a world that, given the difficult circumstances of his life, may not be altogether deserving of it. Even so, readers will love it, and thank themselves for their good fortune ...

for more information click here

Love Story?

This was an interesting time piece, a snap-shot of a place and time that no longer exists. It gives you insight into the cultures, ethnic divisions and hatred that exists just as strongly today as it did in 1918.

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

products you might be interested in