Book Review of forty rules of love

Sometime a person comes to one’s life and changes the life in such a way that one is unable to recognize his life before their arrival.<br />Miss Shafak’s new book, “The Forty Rules of Love”, tell us two such tales; albeit seven hundred years apart. One about a life of an American housewife imprisoned by a lost love which is eventfully liberated by a new but dying lover who is as full with life as a butterfly which has just learnt to fly and with wisdom of an old oak tree, and another of a great scholar and man of wisdom who is converted into a poet and dancing sufi by a wandering dervish.<br />The artistic brilliance of Miss Shafak makes you overlook her remarkable research on the subject. The novel gives a picture of the tolerant and progressive school of Islam which has often been persecuted by the conservatives. The novel also touches upon number of themes and conflicts, the prominent being the will of a polite but strong man against brutal force of the masses. Other themes are a son’s jealousy, an unrequited love which causes the lover’s death and lifelong guilt, the eyes of a victim looking deep in the heart of his assassin, an unbearable pain of losing loved one, the story of a religion of tolerance which prohibits prostitutes, sick men and drunk to cleanse and a story of an upholder of such religion who searches for his lost humanity in touch of a fallen woman.<br />Both the stories are narrated by the number of characters perhaps because the protagonists were not able to see the changes caused to them by the love; for how a person under a divine trance can describe his own feeling; the words will not only be inadequate but also the traitors.<br />In the end the death of the catalysts only increases the impact on the victims, as only a true love can. The author draws an analogy for this from how silk is made with the death of its creator. Lucky are those who have loved someone, even though they have lost in it, for rest of us this concept is as illusionary as sun to the night. But may be as one of my friend once said, the teacher will appear once a student ready, may be love will appear once you are ready