Name: The forty rules of love
Author: Elif Shafak
Review and plot summary
The Forty Rules of Love is written by Elif Shafak, a French born Turkish writer. Elif Shafak is one of the most acknowledged and bravest of the authors and feminist in Turkey. The Forty Rules of Love is one of her best sellers. The novel consists of two parallel narratives. The contemporary one is about an unhappily married Jewish housewife named Ella living in Northampton, Massachusetts. Ella works for a literary agency and currently she is given a book named “Sweet Blasphemy” by Aziz Zahara. The sweet blasphemy is the second narrative of this novel. Sweet blasphemy is actually about a wandering dervish Shams of Tabriz, who is a mystic Sufi and he sees the vision of his death and he know that he should find a companion to whom he can deliver his knowledge to. For that Shams travels from Samarkand to Baghdad where he gets to know about Jalaluddin Rumi, a famous scholar of that time by a Sufi. Shams travels to Konya where Rumi lives and the story unwraps itself as to how they become friends, how drastically Rumi starts to change and how people start to hate Shams including Rumi’s family . On the other hand Ella becomes acquainted with the writer of sweet blasphemy Aziz Zahara over the email after she becomes highly affected by the sweet blasphemy. Over the course of emails with Aziz Zahara she finds out she is ready to give up her life, her children, her husband for the guy on the other end of the email.
The style of the novel is a narrative one and although the sweet blasphemy Is really captivating the narrative of Ella somehow adds some weakness to the novel. The writer nailed it in narrating the sweet blasphemy the way it was shown from many perspectives sometimes from the perspective of shams, sometimes a beggar, sometimes zealot or Rumi or prostitute or even the family of Rumi. That really shows the picture of what was actually happening, the love of Rumi for Shams and the hatred of the townspeople and Rumi’s family towards Shams. But the narrative of Ella lacks the multiple perspectives. It is just from the perspective of Ella, if it was from the point of view of Aziz or her children then the reader would have understood Ella’s story more clearly.
The Forty Rules of Love takes Sufism into blockbuster territory. It interweaves Ella’s quest to find love with Shams’s and Rumi’s quest for beatitude through friendship, as told by a range of characters including Rumi’s wife and sons: one of whom was to assassinate Shams, the other to carry on his father’s work. The narrative is racy, told in first-person fragments, letters, emails and braided through with Shams’s theosophy as told through his 40 rules of love. Elif Shafak expounds a populist rather than a scholarly Sufism, providing a vigourous and easily assimilable introduction to Sufi thought.
References.
Afzii (2014). The forty rules of love-review. The Guardian. Retrieved on 1st June, 2016 from
http://www.theguardian.com/childrens-books-site/2014/dec/05/review-elif- shafak-forty-rules-of-love
Adil, A. (2010).The Forty Rules of Love, By Elif Shafak. Independent. Retrieved on 1st June, 2016 from
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/the-forty-rules- of-love-by-elif-shafak-2021678.html
