Read Yes
Length 358
Quick Review When an unhappy, Jewish mother in Massachusetts begins reading a novel by a wandering, Sufi man, she embarks on a personal journey for love, self, and truth.
This was suggested to me by one of my followers, and I was hesitant to say the least. I am not into romance or mushy-gushy love stories. This one has love in the title. I was pleasantly surprised. The Forty Rules of Love by Elif Shafak is not so much about romantic love as it is about being a good person and walking through the world with love in your heart.
Ella is newly 40 with a romantic daughter in college, tweenaged twins with troubles, and a dallying husband, but if she ignores it and focuses on her new job, maybe it will all go away. Ella focused on her family for many years, but now she has a new job as a reader for a literary agent. She must read Sweet Blasphemy and submit a report. The book is so drastically different from her own life, and, yet, she is drawn in to the story and the author, who she begins a correspondence with.
Sweet Blasphemy is about the friendship between Shams of Tabriz and the exalted poet Rumi. Told from many perspectives, it is a tale of friendship, love, trust, wandering, destiny, and mysticism. Shams of Tabriz is a wandering dervish, who enters Rumi’s life and Konya, Turkey changing both forever. Shams has forty rules for the religion of love. Although, I don’t necessarily agree with all of them, there are a lot of truly poignant moments and quotes.
Several people told me the ending is heartbreaking. Honestly, I thought it was the most appropriate ending. It isn’t shocking, but any other ending would be a disservice to the novel and the meaning.
Shafak writes a novel within a novel. It’s not a new story framework, but she does it exceedingly well. Everytime the story would shift from one to the other, I would always be wondering what would happen next. Shafak has an incredibly deep belief in love and humanity as she explores prejudice and malice and blind religiosity among other things. The narrators are not always good people, but they all have a perspective that bolsters the main theme.
Elif Shafak is a Turkish author, and her native language is Turkish. However, she writes her novels in English. As a linguist who has learned several languages, I CANNOT imagine writing novels in another language. It is incredibly hard, and she does it so well. I would have never been able to tell from reading The Forty Rules of Love that she is not a native speaker.
Memorable Quotes
“When you speak the truth, they hate you. “
“Finally I understood that whenever people heard something unusual, they called it a dream.”
“Patience does not mean to passively endure. It means to be farsighted enough to trust the end result of the process.”
“These codes of honor had less to do with the harmony God created than with the order human beings wanted to sustain.”