Fiction
THE FORTYRULES OF LOVE
Elif Shafak
Publisher: Penguin Books; Reprint edition (April 26, 2011)
Language: English
Pages: 368, paperback
“Every true love and friendship is a story of unexpected transformation. If we are the same person before and after we loved, that means we haven’t loved enough.”“The real challenge is to love the good and the bad together, not because you need to take the rough with the smooth but because you need to go beyond such descriptions and accept love in its entirety.”
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Elif Shafak’s characters stay in your subconscious mind long after you have turned the final page of her book. They are hard to forget. That’s how well she develops her characters and brings them to life. You only wish the same could be said of her storytelling. You would expect it from an author who claims, time and again, that her homeland is none other than storyland.
Inspired by Rumi’s messages on love, ‘The Forty Rules of Love’, like most of Shafak’s works, manages to confuse you no end. This often-poetic novel within a novel story unfolds in two parallel narratives. The first one takes place in the 21st century and is about an unhappily married Jewish housewife named Ella living in Northampton, Massachusetts. Ella works for a literary agency and is given the task of writing a report on a book titled ‘Sweet Blasphemy’ by Aziz Zahara. The sweet blasphemy is the second narrative of this novel that is set in the 13th century. It’s about Rumi and the infamous wandering dervish known as Shams of Tabriz.
The story of Ella finding love with a bohemian Sufi mystic while in the process of evaluating his book that is set in a time period we are familiar with is a lot less believable than the one where Rumi and Shams of Tabriz find comfort in each other’s company. And it’s the story that takes place in an era that you can’t really relate to that the readers find themselves increasing drawn to as the narrative progresses.
There is also an overdose of clichés that distract from the storytelling. Phrases like ‘shivers go down the spine’, ‘bowled over’, ‘far off the beaten track’, and, ‘make a mountain out of a molehill’, make the narrative somewhat annoying and lame. Shafak, who has previously written both in English and Turkish, seems to have made a mistake by writing the novel first in English, having it translated into Turkish, and then rewriting it in English. The experiment, albeit interesting, doesn’t quite work.
Despite having been quite harshly critical of her work, we would still like to recommend Shafak’s The Forty Rules of Love to our readers. If not for Shafak, then you might want to read it for Rumi or as an introduction to Sufi thoughts and ideologies. Also, the lessons Shafak shares through Rumi’s story encourage you to make some changes in your life and fill it with love and even if that were the only reason to read this book, it’s reason enough.
