Saturday, October 3, 2020

The Forty Rules of Love - by Elif Shafak


I must say this is one of the most beautiful books. So our Ella has a mid-life crisis at 40 with 3 teenager children and an unfaithful husband. After being a housewife all along, she takes up a reader job for a literary agency. Her first book happens to be Sweet Blasphemy by a new author Aziz who happens to stumble upon Sufism after a series of disasters in his life.  


Sweet Blasphemy is a story stitched around the encounter between two people, the most renowned Sufi poet Rumi and a Sufi Dervish Shams of Tabriz. A genius poet and an enlightened mystic, and how the genius became a poet. 


With surprises thrown at her during family lunch, she realises she doesn’t love her husband anymore. During her quest for love Sweet Blasphemy talks to her in an unimaginable way, where she learns about the forty rules of love as told by Shams. So she decides to email the author and conversations happen. 


Ella’s life takes a drastic turn when she meets the author and learns about his life. As she walks out of her marriage, she finds love but loses the person she loved.


All in all it was an amazing read which fills all hearts with love and its forty rules. It imparts a few raw spiritual knowledge which could have been elaborated and simplified. One of my personal favourites is - “In order to be reborn, one should die before death”.

 


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