The Forty Rules of Love: A Novel of Rumi by Elif Shafak (English) Paperback Book

Description: The Forty Rules of Love by Elif Shafak The bestselling author of "The Bastard of Instanbul" returns with a lyrical, imaginative new novel about the famous Sufi mystic Rumi. FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Publisher Description In this lyrical, exuberant tale, acclaimed Turkish author Elif Shafak, author of The Island of Missing Trees (a Reeses Book Club Pick), incarnates Rumis timeless message of loveThe Forty Rules of Love unfolds two tantalizing parallel narratives—one contemporary and the other set in the thirteenth century, when Rumi encountered his spiritual mentor, the whirling dervish known as Shams of Tabriz—that together explore the enduring power of Rumis work. Ella Rubenstein is forty years old and unhappily married when she takes a job as a reader for a literary agent. Her first assignment is to read and report on Sweet Blasphemy, a novel written by a man named Aziz Zahara. Ella is mesmerized by his tale of Shamss search for Rumi and the dervishs role in transforming the successful but unhappy cleric into a committed mystic, passionate poet, and advocate of love. She is also taken with Shamss lessons, or rules, that offer insight into an ancient philosophy based on the unity of all people and religions, and the presence of love in each and every one of us. As she reads on, she realizes that Rumis story mirrors her own and that Zahara—like Shams—has come to set her free. Author Biography ELIF SHAFAK is an award-winning British-Turkish author of a dozen novels, including There Are Rivers in the Sky, The Island of Missing Trees, shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award, and 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World, shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Her work has been translated into fifty-six languages. She holds a PhD in political science and has taught at universities in Turkey, the U.S. and the UK. She lives in London and is an honorary fellow at Oxford University. Review Praise for The Forty Rules of Love:"Heres a middle-aged love story and the inside story of one of historys great friendships, and on top of all that, the story of the battle within medieval Islam between the conservatives and the Sufis... Laugh, cry, tear your hair out as you learn." —NPR.org"A captivating and wise book . . . The tale of the fated meeting, spiritual companionship, and tragic parting of [Rumi and Shams of Tabriz] is beautifully recounted in The Forty Rules of Love. . . . Shafak draws on facts from Rumis and Shams biographies and brings them to life with deft storytelling."—Associated Press"A gorgeous, jeweled, luxurious book . . . The past and the present fit together beautifully in a passionate defense of passion itself." —The Times (London)"In this appealing fable, Turkish author Elif Shafak toggles between characters from different times: a modern American housewife and a thirteenth-century poet. . . . The universal theme is struggle between the rational mind and the aching heart. Shafaks heroine yields to the latter and never looks back."—More magazine Review Quote "A captivating and wise book . . . The tale of the fated meeting, spiritual companionship, and tragic parting of [Rumi and Shams of Tabriz] is beautifully Discussion Question for Reading Group Guide INTRODUCTION A novel within a novel, The Forty Rules of Love tells two parallel stories that mirror each other across two very different cultures and seven intervening centuries. Forty-year-old Ella Rubenstein is an ordinary unhappy housewife with three children and an unfaithful husband, but her life begins to change dramatically when she takes a job as a reader for a literary agency. Her first assignment is a novel intriguingly titled Sweet Blasphemy, about the thirteenth-century poet Rumi and his beloved Sufi teacher Shams of Tabriz. The author is an unknown first-time novelist, Aziz Zahara, who lives in Turkey. Initially reluctant to take on a book about a time and place so different from her own, Ella soon finds herself captivated both by the novel and the man who wrote it, with whom she begins an e-mail flirtation. As she reads, she begins to question the many ways she has settled for a conventional life devoid of passion and real love. At the center of the novel that Ella is reading is the remarkable, wandering, whirling dervish Shams of Tabriz, a mystic provocateur who challenges conventional wisdom and social and religious prejudice wherever he encounters it. He is searching for the spiritual companion he is destined to teach. His souls purpose is to transform his student, Rumi--a beloved but rather complacent, unmystical preacher--into one of the worlds great poets, the "voice of love." Rumi is a willing student, but his family and community resent Shams deeply for upsetting their settled way of life. Rumi is admired, even revered in his community and Shams must lead him beyond the comforts of his respectable way of life, beyond the shallow satisfactions of the ego. In essence, both Rumi and Ella, through their relationships with Shams and Aziz, are forced to question and then abandon the apparent safety and security of their lives for the uncertainty, ecstasy, and heartbreak of love. Neither Shams nor Aziz can offer anything like a promise of lasting happiness. What they can offer is a taste of mystical union, divine love, the deep harmony that arises when the false self--constructed to meet societys demands for respectability--is shed and the true self emerges. Along the way, Shams imparts the forty rules of love, essential Sufi wisdom that Shams both preaches and embodies. He repeatedly defies social and religious conventions, putting himself in danger and drawing down the scorn and wrath of the self-righteous, literal-minded moralists who surround him. He inspires Rumi to become the poet he was meant to be, one of the worlds most passionate and profound voices of wisdom. Similarly, Aziz--and his story of Rumi and Shams--inspires Ella to step out of a marriage that has become emotionally and spiritually stifling for her. It is not an easy story that Elif Shafak tells, nor an entirely happy one. There are costs, she seems to say, to living an authentic life. But, as the novel shows, the costs of not living one are far greater. ABOUT ELIF SHAFAK Elif Shafak was born in Strasbourg, France, in 1971. She is an award-winning novelist and the most widely read female writer in Turkey. Critics have hailed her as one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary literature in both Turkish and English. She is also the author of the novel The Bastard of Istanbul and her memoir, Black Milk . Her books have been translated into more than thirty languages. Married with two children, Elif divides her time between London and Istanbul. A CONVERSATION WITH ELIF SHAFAK Q. What prompted you to write a novel centered on the relationship between Rumi and his beloved teacher Shams of Tabriz? Has Rumis poetry always been important to you? My starting point, as simple as it sounds, was the concept of love. I wanted to write a novel on love but from a spiritual angle. Once you make that your wish the path takes you to Rumi, the voice of love. His poetry and philosophy have always inspired me. His words speak to us across centuries, cultures. One can never finish reading him; it is an endless journey. Q. Why did you decide to make The Forty Rules of Love such a polyphonic novel, using so many different narrators? The truth of fiction is not a fixed thing. If anything, it is more fluid than solid. It changes depending on each person, each character. Literature, unlike daily politics, recognizes the significance of ambiguity, plurality, flexibility. Interestingly, this artistic approach is also in harmony with Sufi philosophy. Sufis, like artists, live in an ever-fluid world. They believe one should never be too sure of himself and they respect the amazing diversity in the universe. So it was very important to me to reflect that variety as I was writing my story. Q. What kind of research did you do for the novel? How much imaginative license did you take with the historical facts? When you write about historical figures you feel somewhat intimidated at the beginning. It is not like writing about imaginary characters. So to get the facts right, I did a lot of research. It is not a new subject to me. I wrote my masters thesis on this subject and I have been working on it since my early twenties. So there was some background. However, after a period of intense reading and researching, I stopped doing that and solely concentrated in my story. I allowed the characters to guide me. In my experience the more we, as writers, try to control our characters, the more lifeless they become. By the same token, the less there is of the ego of the writer in the process of writing, the more alive the fictional characters and the more creative the story. Q. What are the challenges of writing about such a well-known and revered figure like Rumi? Do you feel you succeeded remaining true to the historical Rumi while bringing him fully into the imaginative realm of your novel? It was a big challenge, I must say. On the one hand I have huge respect for both Rumi and Shams of Tabriz. So it was important to me to hear their voices, to understand their legacy as best as I could. Yet on the other hand, I am a writer. I do not believe in heroes. In literature, there are no perfect heroes. Every person is a microcosm with many sides and conflicting aspects. So it was essential for me to see them as human beings, without putting them up on a pedestal. Q. Did your perception of Rumi and of Shams change in the course of writing about them? Writing this novel changed me perhaps in more ways than I can understand or explain. Every book changes us to a certain extent. Some books more so than others. They transform their readers, and they also transform their writers. This was one of those books for me. When I finished it I was not the same person I was at the beginning. Q. Much of the novel concerns the position of women both in the medieval Islamic world and in contemporary Western society. What is your sense of how women are faring in the Middle East today compared to women in Western cultures? We tend to think that as human beings we have made amazing progress throughout the centuries. And we like to think that the women in the West are emancipated whereas women in the East are oppressed all the time. I like to question these deeply embedded clich Excerpt from Book Prologue B etween your fingers you hold a stone and throw it into flowing water. The effect might not be easy to see. There will be a small ripple where the stone breaks the surface and then a splash, muffled by the rush of the surrounding river. Thats all. Throw a stone into a lake. The effect will be not only visible but also far more lasting. The stone will disrupt the still waters. A circle will form where the stone hit the water, and in a flash that circle will multiply into another, then another. Before long the ripples caused by one plop will expand until they can be felt everywhere along the mirrored surface of the water. Only when the circles reach the shore will they stop and die out. If a stone hits a river, the river will treat it as yet another commotion in its already tumultuous course. Nothing unusual. Nothing unmanageable. If a stone hits a lake, however, the lake will never be the same again. For forty years Ella Rubinsteins life had consisted of still waters--a predictable sequence of habits, needs, and preferences. Though it was monotonous and ordinary in many ways, she had not found it tiresome. During the last twenty years, every wish she had, every person she befriended, and every decision she made was filtered through her marriage. Her husband, David, was a successful dentist who worked hard and made a lot of money. She had always known that they did not connect on any deep level, but connecting emotionally need not be a priority on a married couples list, she thought, especially for a man and a woman who had been married for so long. There were more important things than passion and love in a marriage, such as understanding, affection, compassion, and that most godlike act a person could perform, forgiveness. Love was secondary to any of these. Unless, that is, one lived in novels or romantic movies, where the protagonists were always larger than life and their love nothing short of legend. Ellas children topped her list of priorities. They had a beautiful daughter in college, Jeannette, and teenage twins, Orly and Avi. Also, they had a twelve-year-old golden retriever, Spirit, who had been Ellas walking buddy in the mornings and her cheeriest companion ever since hed been a puppy. Now he was old, overweight, completely deaf, and almost blind; Spirits time was coming, but Ella preferred to think he would go on forever. Then again, that was how she was. She never confronted the death of anything, be it a habit, a phase, or a marriage, even when the end stood right in front of her, plain and inevitable. The Rubinsteins lived in Northampton, Massachusetts, in a large Victorian house that needed some renovation but still was splendid, with five bedrooms, three baths, shiny hardwood floors, a three-car garage, French doors, and, best of all, an outdoor Jacuzzi. They had life insurance, car insurance, retirement plans, college savings plans, joint bank accounts, and, in addition to the house they lived in, two prestigious apartments: one in Boston, the other in Rhode Island. She and David had worked hard for all this. A big, busy house with children, elegant furniture, and the wafting scent of homemade pies might seem a clich Details ISBN0143118528 Author Elif Shafak Short Title 40 RULES OF LOVE Pages 368 Language English ISBN-10 0143118528 ISBN-13 9780143118527 Media Book Format Paperback DEWEY FIC Birth 1971 Year 2011 Publication Date 2011-04-26 Subtitle A Novel of Rumi Place of Publication New York, NY Country of Publication United States AU Release Date 2011-04-26 NZ Release Date 2011-04-26 US Release Date 2011-04-26 UK Release Date 2011-04-26 Publisher Penguin Putnam Inc Imprint Penguin USA Audience General We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. With fast shipping, low prices, friendly service and well over a million items - you're bound to find what you want, at a price you'll love! TheNile_Item_ID:43648576;

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