40 Rules of Love
Author: Elif Safak
Language: 3/5
Content: 4/5
Overall: 7/10
This book is a story of parallels. Two parallel stories set centuries and worlds apart, to be exact. However, the stories and the people taking part in them have more in common that you'd think.
The Forty Rules of Love is, as you might imagine, a story about love in all it's forms. It includes friendship, romantic love and divine love and makes the reader question whether there is actually much of a difference between what we distinguish as different types of love.
On one hand, there is the story of Rumi and his love Shams Tabrizi and on the other hand is Ella, a typical American middle-class housewife. The novel switches between the two timelines allowing the reader to almost flow through the timeline in parallel universes. I personally believe it's a very successful way of setting out the book.
It definitely serves as a good introduction to Sufism and hopefully will cause people to read Rumi's poems. Sufism is incredibly interesting not only from a philosophical standpoint but also from the angle of religious interpretation and a book this popular is a non-negligible tool in raising awareness.
Other than that, I actually found some aspects of the novel childish, cliche even. Especially towards the end I felt like Safak got carried away with trying to form parallels and took the easy way out. She might have meant it to serve as yet another example of one of the Forty Rules: 'While the parts change, the whole remains the same. For every thief who departs this world, a new one is born. And every decent person who passes away is replaced by a new one. In this way not only does nothing remain the same but also nothing every really changes.' If so, not only is this an 'outer reading' of the rule, it is also a misrepresentation of the Sufi belief.
On a brighter note, I thought the language was flowing and devoid of forced sentences. It wasn't anything to write home about but it wasn't bad either.
There are however, also sophisticated pleasant details in the book such as every chapter starting with the letter B as it is in the Mathnawi.
All in all, I believe it was an enjoyable book to read which gave a reader-friendly introduction to a very important poet and his beliefs. At this point, I should say that I put off reading this book for years because I was hesitant about Elif Safak as a writer. I had read 'The Bastard of Istanbul' which I had loved but thought she wrote books on topics she knew would be popular. I also happened to read this book at a time in my life where I made a couple of major decisions. I am not sure if that also affected by views but I can easily say I very much enjoyed the book and am looking forward to reading a few of Safak's other books (starting with re-reading The Bastard of Istanbul)
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