‘Ali and Nino’ is a Romeo and Juilet-esque tale of star-crossed lovers: Ali Khan, Mohammedan and Azerbaijani, and Nino Kipiani, a beautiful Georgian and Christian aristocrat. I can’t even explain quite how this happened, but it just seemed like there was so much richness, detail, fact and history of Azerbaijan, it made the desert, buildings and melting pot of cultures spring up around you. With sweeping descriptions vividly colouring the desert of Azerbaijan, ‘Ali and Nino’, like no other novel read on this project really took me to the country. It is an excellent book, and despite the cloudy authorship, as Azerbaijan’s national novel there was no greater (or easier) choice! If you are interested in the Kurban Said question, there has been some research done and a book published here. ‘Ali and Nino’ reads part travel literature, love story, cultural cross-section, political recount. Given the ethnographic depth of the novel, I, like Theroux, would tend to lean toward the latter. He has apparently been whittled down to two options: an Austrian Baroness or an exiled Azerbaijani Jew, as Paul Theroux claims in the introduction to ‘Ali and Nino’.
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