Book Review: Ali and Nino: A Love Story

Book Review: Ali and Nino: A Love Story

Ali and Nino: A Love Story on amazon.com

Reading Rating: 8.5/10

Salaams! Just finished reading a great book that GregP recommended called Ali and Nino: A Love Story, by Kurban Said. Written back in 1937 and then "lost" to the world, it is hailed as a "lost classic." It is much more than a love story, although it is that as well. It is really the story of the clash of two worlds--of the East (Asia) and the West (Europe)--and the way that two people who worked through those differences due to their deep love for each other. Ali is an Azeri from Baku, a Muslim--from old, aristocratic Azeri stock; one of his uncles is a prince in Persia and has a big palace and harem. Nino is Georgian and Christian, also from a very wealthy aristocratic family. This is the story of their upbringing and their intertwined lives on the eve of World War I. The story carries through the White Russian defeat by the Turks and then just into the Red Russian victory which swept Azerbaijan back into the "Russian fold" and the Soviet Union for 60+ years.

A glimpse into the tugging between the East and the West is revealed when Ali is on the TransCaucacasian train going back to Baku from part of a summer spent in Georgia with Nino's family/relatives (great cross-cultural adjustments unpacked there) and he sees the desert and a caravan of camels. He thinks:

This was where I belonged, to the camels, to the men leading them, to the sand! These Europeans with their wars, their cities, their Czars, Kaisers and Kings? Their sorrows, their happiness, their cleanliness and their dirt--we have a different way of being clean or dirty, good or bad, we have a different rhythm and different faces. Let the train rush to the West. My heart and soul belong to the East.

This unique couple's travels and experiences take them to Georgia, Daghestan, and parts of Persia--with some very interesting days spent in Tehran during the days of the holy Shi'ite month of Moharram.


ISBN: 0385720408
Publisher: Anchor Books/Doubleday
Publication Date: 10/2000
282 pages

Ali and Nino: A Love Story (Anchor Books)
Said, Kurban; Graman, Jenia; Theroux, Paul
Kurban Said was the pseudonym of Lev Nussimbaum, who grew up in Baku and died in Italy in 1942.

"Ali and Nino", first published in Vienna in 1937, is an intense, enduring love story -- a sweeping tale of love challenged by war and by the cultural divide between a westernized Christian girl (Nino) and a tradition-minded Muslim boy (Ali).

The lovers meet in oil-rich Baku, Azerbaijan -- a town on the Caspian Sea where east meets west, separated from Russia by both the Caucasian mountains and by its Muslim majority. Growing up in a powerful Islamic family (his uncle has an opulent palace complete with a harem) Ali loves the desert, engages in blood feuds, and embraces the fierce code of honor of his ancestors. But he also goes to a westernized Russian-run high school, where he falls in love with Nino, a beautiful Christian girl from Georgia who loves western fashion and finds the concept of wearing a veil unthinkable.

Ali and Nino decide that their love can overcome all the differences between them -- and they marry despite their families' objections. But then the beginnings of WWI and the Russian Revolution stir up all the old divisions -- Muslims against Christians, Russians against Persians, Shiites against Sunnis. Ali must meet his former classmates on opposite sides of the battlefield, and Nino must flee Azerbaijan with their infant daughter. Although their love is still strong, it becomes increasingly impossible for them to remain true to their conflicting loyalties. A sweeping romantic saga that has been compared to Dr. Zhivago and Gone with the Wind, "Ali and Nino" is at once an unforgettable romance, a war-time adventure, and a portrait of the political and ethnic turmoil that continues in this region even today.

Publisher Comments:
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.

Review:
"Poignant and beautiful...alive with a vividly unique vision of colliding cultures and enduring love."-Newsweek
Review:
"One feels as if one had dug up buried treasure--. An epic of cultural change that seems more immediate than this morning's headlines."-The New York Times
Review:
"The brilliant sunset light [Ali and Nino] sheds on a millennial civilization is like living history; the alien yet immensely human characters draw one into their world with vivid conviction. The rescue of this novel is certainly an important literary event."-Mary Renault
Review:
"An emotional magic carpet...Rich, exciting, and brightly amusing as well as sorrowful along the way, page after iridescent page."The Plain Dealer

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