Review writing

1. Submitted by: Khadija Tahira 043
Submitted to : Ma’am KiranKhalid
Nothing beyond Love for Humanity: Elif Shafak’s The Forty Rules of Love
Review Writing
BOOK DETAILS:
Title: The Forty Rules of Love
Author: Elif Shafak
Year: 2010
Place: UK
Pages: 350
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 21st century cosmopolitan

2. 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

3. 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.