What sort of things makes the book unputdownable?
The question is Unanswerable. It shall be a sheer mistake if we started to contemplate what the writing process is best to hit. Everyone has different taste of words.
Recently, I read ‘Forty rules of love’ by Elif Shafak, she is an award-winning novelist and the most widely read woman writer in Turkey. She has published 15 books, including Bastard of Istanbul, her books have been translated into more than forty languages.
It is the book about Sufism; 13th-century wandering Persian Sufi Dervish and, about Rumi and his companionship with Shams of Tabriz. Rumi is famously known for advocating love and his poem from thirteenth centuries.
If you had already distinguished between Rumi and his poetry, you would be more fascinated by this book. Shafak tried to unearth a new way to tell a story: it does not just leave ephemeral inducement, also it has the power to linger in your mind. Shams says somewhere in the book “they say there is a thin line between losing yourself in god and losing your mind.”
The story starts from Ella’s Northampton kitchen. She is a housewife of three children; almost deserted by her husband. She seems quite unhappy with her life. She got the job as a literary agent, and as soon as she got to read a manuscript written by the mysterious author, her life changed. It has two parallel stories, a novel within a novel, one set in the twentieth century, while another takes place in the thirteenth century. The novel is about spiritual love, basically Sufism. When she started reading the manuscript called ‘sweet blasphemy’, which is about the tale of Rumi and his mentor dervish, Shams of Tabriz, her tumultuous life gets better then. She immediately starts to write an email to mysterious author Aziz Zahara and it has replete influential sentences about being patient, which can waft your soul away. The novel has four sections of earth, water, wind, fire and the void.
Rule 3 states, “You can study God through everything and everyone in the universe because God is not confined to a mosque, synagogue or church. But if you are still in need of knowing where exactly His abode is, there is only one place to look for him: in the heart of a true lover.”
By and large, the novel is worth reading. The Best things in this novel are forty rules of love, which have been told by Shams. Email conversation of Ella and mystery writer and transformation of Rumi’s life of a scholar to a poet at the same time gives you enthusiasm, energy, interest, and curiosity. Rest assured, it is a tempestuous book about spiritual love, but it has a naive story of Rumi and his short-term-companion. The most special thing is, yet, all characters tell their story in their own way except Ella. It enhances the depth of perception of a novel and character as well.