Nothing beyond Love for Humanity: Elif Shafak’s The Forty Rules of Love

Dr. Sonika Sethi

Assistant Professor of English
S D College, Ambala Cantt
Haryana-134001
sonrok@yahoo.com
#94169-54546

Book Review

BOOK DETAILS:
Title: The Forty Rules of Love
Author: Elif Shafak
Publisher: Penguin/ Viking
Year: 2010
Place: UK
Pages: 350
Price: 8.99£
ISBN: 978-0-241-97293-9
Genre: Fiction

Elif Shafak’s novel The Forty Rules of Love bathes in the idea of love for
humanity in a world devoid of spiritualism and faith. The novel not only
juxtaposes two different generations but also blends in two centuries to bring
home the fact that the world needs only one solution to its problems— Love.
The problems may be myriad— cosmic, national, regional, personal or
individual, yet the answer is the same. Only love can save the doomed
humanity from dying an untimely and unnatural death caused by religious
bigotries and the havoc wreaked on one man by another due to intolerance of
beliefs and ideas. Multilayered and multidimensional, the novel beautifully
and intelligently intersperses the lives of four people— two from the
thirteenth century Turkey and two from the 21 s t century cosmopolitan world.
Ella Rubinstein, a bored housewife and a mother of three teenage children
with immense talent which she brings forth in her mundane life through
cooking extravagant meals for the family, painfully realizes through letters to
and from a stranger, Aziz Z. Zahara, that she had been living a life devoid of
love. Her husband has been cheating on her, her children found her too
intruding and she didn’t have a career of her own. She joins a literary agency
as a part time reader to while away her spare time and the first assignment
that she lands up with, is, to read the manuscript of a novel titled “Sweet
Blasphemy” by some new writer A.Z. Zahara. Ella is supposed to go through
the manuscript and provide an extensive report to the agency. It is while
reading the manuscript of “Sweet Blasphemy” that Ella encounters her own
self. The novel takes her back to thirteenth century Turkey and relates to her
the forty rules of love presented by thirteenth century mystic Sufi saint,
Shams of Tabriz to his beloved friend Mawlana Jalal ad-Din Rumi, the
famous Sufi poet. The forty rules of love open up a new and enchanting world
for Ella as it did to Rumi about eight centuries ago— a world where there is
only one religion— love for human beings, where God is a beloved and not
something monstrous to be afraid of, where all men and women are equal
before God, where no one tells the other how to pray to God, what life to
lead, what is virtue and what is vice. Freedom from all orthodoxy and
religious fanaticism, is, what is called Spirituality. How does a simple novel
change Ella’s entire life and her idea of love, is what The Forty Rules of Love
is all about. Love that restrains or constraints, is not love. Love is liberating.
Love is Spirituality and spirituality cannot be attained without the love of
mankind— is the theme of the novel. The language is amazingly prosaic
poetry with an unrestrained flow of thoughts. Elif Shafak is a master
storyteller and her novel is a story with layers upon layers of narratives
interwoven into its fabric. Every character in the novel is a narrator. Though
dates and years have been mentioned yet the novel does not follow a strict
chronological sequence shuttling all the while from the ancient to the
contemporary. The novel is a must read for all the lovers of Elif Shafak and
otherwise too.