Elif Shafak - Soufi, mon amour ( The Forty Rules Of Love )

Dear readers,
As this is the first review of Elif Sahafk's books that i'm doing. I'll start with a little introduction of her.
Elif Shafak in Turkish Elif Şafak (born 25 October 1971) is a Turkish-British novelist essayist, academic, public speaker and women's rights activist. She writes in both Turkish and English, Published 16 books, which includes the best selling The Bastard Of Istanbul and The Forty Rules Of Love that It sold more than 750,000 copies, becoming an all-time bestseller in Turkey and France.

Soufi, mon amour or as it was published in English with its original name ' The Forty Rules Of Love ' and in Turkish Aşk focused on love in the light of Rumi and Shams of Tabriz.
The novel consists of two parallel narratives. The contemporary one is about a forty years old unhappily married Jewish housewife named Ella living in Northampton, Massachusetts, who takes up a job as a reader for a literary agent. Her first assignment is to read and report on Sweet Blasphemy ( Doux Blasphème ), a novel written by Aziz Zahara.

The sweet blasphemy is the second narrative of this novel. It is about a wandering dervish Shams of Tabriz, who is a mystic Sufi and he sees the vision of his death and know that he should find a companion to whom he can deliver his knowledge to. For that Shams travels from Samarkand to Baghdad where he gets to know about Jalaluddin Rumi, a famous scholar of that time by a Sufi.

Shams travels to Konya where Rumi lives and the story unwraps itself as to how they become friends, how Rumi starts to change and how people start to hate Shams including Rumi's family . On the other hand Ella becomes acquainted with the writer of sweet blasphemy Aziz Zahara over the email after she becomes highly affected by the sweet blasphemy. Over the course of emails with Aziz Zahara she finds out she is ready to give up her life, her children, her husband for the guy on the other end of the email.

The style of the novel is a narrative one and although the sweet blasphemy Is really captivating the narrative of Ella somehow adds some weakness to the novel. The writer nailed it in narrating the sweet blasphemy the way it was shown from many perspectives sometimes from the perspective of shams, sometimes a beggar, sometimes zealot or Rumi or prostitute or even the family of Rumi. That really shows the picture of what was actually happening, the love of Rumi for Shams and the hatred of the townspeople and Rumi's family towards Shams.