Elif Shafak
The Forty Rules of Love by Elif Shafak weaves two interlocking narrative threads. The first thread involves Ella Rubenstein, a bored, married housewife and mother of three children, living in a Massachusetts suburb. The year is 2008. Ella, who has recently taken on a position at a literary agency, has been assigned to read and report on a novel by Aziz Zahara. His novel, Sweet Blasphemy, introduces the second thread which takes place in the thirteenth-century and is based on the relationship between the Sufi mystic, Shams of Tabriz, and the famous Persian poet, Rumi. The novel alternates between these two threads.
The Ella sections reveal Ella’s state of mind. She is forty years old, has been married for twenty years, and is unhappy. She is aware of her husband’s infidelities and for reasons that are never made clear, she chooses to ignore them and go on with her life as if nothing is wrong. Somehow, her reading of Sweet Blasphemy awakens in her feelings of frustration with her life. She longs for connection and begins an email correspondence with Aziz, the author of the novel.
The second thread includes the voices of multiple characters, all of whom speak in the first-person. They include Shams, Rumi, Rumi’s wife, his two sons, and several outcasts from society, including a prostitute, a drunk, a zealot, a killer, and a leper. Shams’ interaction with various characters allows him the opportunity to articulate the rules of love associated with Sufi mysticism. It is a result of his influence on Rumi that the latter begins writing the poetry that has made him famous.
The two threads run along parallel lines. Ella is so captivated by Shams’ rules of love that she becomes increasingly disenchanted with her life, eventually deciding to abandon it altogether and follow her heart by being with Aziz. And Rumi is so captivated by Shams’ teaching that he abandons his former life as a well-respected cleric to become a Sufi mystic and an advocate of love without boundaries, all of which find expression in his timeless poetry.
Unfortunately, the novel fails on many levels. The characters are flat and unbelievable. Ella’s story smacks of a soap opera—a bored, unhappy housewife finds love with a globe-trotting man representing all things associated with the exoticism of the East, and, uncharacteristically, she dashes off into the sunset to be with him. The characters speak in clichés and American slang--even those set in the 13th Century. They all sound alike. The language is pedestrian; the dialogue flat. Sufi mysticism is reduced to the appearance of parlor tricks and a pre-packaged, lackluster, and superficial spouting of its basic tenets.
Disappointing.