The Orientalist, English edition

Introduction
On the Trail of Kurban Said

On a cold November morning in Vienna, I walked a maze of narrow streets on the way to see a man who promised to solve the mystery of Kurban Said. I was with Peter Mayer, the president of the Overlook Press, a large, rumpled figure in a black corduroy suit who wanted to publish Said s small romantic novel Ali andNino.Mayer tended to burst into enthusiastic monologues about thebook: You know how when you look at a Vermeer, and it s an interior,and it s quite quiet, yet somehow, what he does with perspective, with light, it feels much bigger that s this novel! A love story set in the Caucasus on the eve of the Russian Revolution, Ali and Nino had been originally published in German in 1937 and was revived in translation in the seventies as a minor classic. But the question of the author s identity had never been resolved. All anyone agreed on was that Kurban Said was the pen name of a writer who had probably come from Baku, an oil city in the Caucasus, and that he was either a nationalist poet who was killed in the Gulags, or the dilettante son of an oil millionaire, or a Viennese café-society writer who died in Italy after stabbing himself in the foot. In the jacket photograph of a book called Twelve Secrets of the Caucasus, the mysterious author is dressed up as a mountain warrior wearing a fur cap, a long, flowing coat with a sewn-in bandolier, and a straight dagger at his waist. Mayer and I were on our way to a meeting with a lawyer named Heinz Barazon, who was challenging Overlook over proper author credit on the novel.

Barazon claimed to know the true identity of Kurban Said, and as the lawyer for the author s heirs, he was insisting that it be acknowledged in the new edition of Ali and Nino or he would block publication. At the lawyer s address, next to a shop where some old women were bent over tables with needle and thread, we were buzzed into a lobby that could have had the grime of the Anschluss on its

Tom Reiss

Spellbinding history . . . part detective yarn, part author biography, part travel saga . . . The Orientalist is completely fascinating.
The Dallas Morning News

Rarely in the literary annals of identity confusion has there been a tale as gripping. . . . A captivating and disquieting parable of the mystery of identity . . . truly page-turning.
The Miami Herald

Sympathetic, elegant, and extraordinarily affecting . . . Reiss s storytelling panache [is] spellbinding.
Los Angeles Times Book Review

Thrilling, novelistic and rich with the personal and political madness of early-twentieth-century Europe.
Entertainment Weekly

A brainy, nimble, remarkable book.
Chicago Tribune

A wondrous tale, beautifully told . . . mesmerizing, poignant, and almost incredible. Reiss, caught up in the spell of Essad Bey, has turned around and worked some magic of his own.
The New York Times

For sheer reading pleasure . . . this book cannot be bettered.
The New York Sun