I picked this up so that I could have something quiet and reflective and that is just the case that it was though not in the way I thought it would be.
What this book actually is, is a braided double narrative about Rumi, the thirteenth-century poet from Konya, and a wandering dervish named Shams of Tabriz who walked into his life and changed him forever. Wrapped around that historical story is a second, much quieter story about a bored American housewife named Ella Rubinstein, who happens to be reading the manuscript that we are reading. It is the kind of structure that could have been gimmicky, but mostly it isn't.
How the format actually works
The book runs on two parallel tracks that keep quietly talking to each other. In the present day, Ella is a middle-aged mother in Massachusetts whose marriage is polite, stable, and emotionally empty. She takes a part-time job reading manuscripts for a literary agent and gets handed a novel called Sweet Blasphemy. That novel, which the reader is also given in full, tells the story of how Shams of Tabriz arrived in Konya in the thirteenth century and slowly turned Rumi from a respected religious scholar into someone who would dance barefoot in the street at the memory of his friend.
So you are sitting in an odd position as a reader. You are reading a novel. Inside that novel, a woman is also reading a novel. And the two books start trading insights, with the historical one gently commenting on the modern one without ever saying so out loud. This sounds exhausting to describe, and somehow it isn't exhausting to read, which is the first thing I want to give Shafak credit for.
Why the Konya chapters are the real book
If I am being completely honest, Ella's modern storyline felt thin to me. Her unhappiness is real but sketched in very light strokes, and her arc resolves a little too neatly for the weight the book wants to put on it. At one point she makes a life-changing decision on what feels like two days of inner debate, and that moment should have been heavier. It should have cost her something to read.
The parts that really held me were the chapters set in Konya. Shafak has clearly done her research. The marketplace scenes. The skepticism of Rumi's students when this strange new friend arrives and threatens their direct access to their teacher. The slow unraveling of a family who had their father to themselves and suddenly have to share him with a stranger. There is a chapter from the perspective of Rumi's son, Ala-ad-Din, who cannot stand Shams, and it is one of the saddest things in the book. You can tell the author had real sympathy for him.
Shafak is also very good at rotating narrators inside the historical sections. One chapter will come from a harlot. The next from a drunkard. The next from Rumi's wife, Kerra. The one after that from a killer-for-hire who will become important much later. Each of them sounds genuinely different on the page, which sounds like a small thing until you try to pull it off as a writer. Most novelists don't bother. They give every character the same internal voice with different names attached.
The forty rules themselves
The rules are scattered through the book like bookmarks. Some of them read like the kind of line you would see on a fridge magnet in a yoga studio. A few are closer to aphorism than insight, and one or two feel like they contradict each other if you put them side by side. Others are sharper, and they keep coming back to you at odd times.
The one that stuck with me for a week was rule number eleven, on the idea that the seeker changes in the act of seeking:
"The quest for love changes us. There is no seeker among those who search for love who has not matured on the way. The moment you start looking for love, you start to change within and without."
I am not sure I fully agree with every rule in the book. But I don't think Shafak wants you to. They are not meant to be a manual. They are forty different angles on the same question, and the cumulative effect of reading them all is that you start to notice the shape of the question itself.
Who I would hand it to
If you liked Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist and wished it had more texture, more historical grounding, and a second plot line to argue with, this is probably your book. If you came in expecting a conventional love story between Ella and the novelist she eventually corresponds with, you are going to be confused for about fifty pages and then either bounce off it or fall in.
I didn't fall in completely. The modern frame kept me at arm's length the whole time, and a couple of the rules felt like they were repeated almost word for word later on. But I kept thinking about the book after I put it down, which is more than I can say for most novels I read last year. A book that stays in your head for a week is doing something right, even when parts of it frustrate you.
What I would change
If I were Shafak's editor, I would have either cut Ella's storyline to about a quarter of its current length, or rewritten it so it had more friction. As it stands, the modern half of the book feels like a frame for the historical half rather than a story that deserves its own weight. That is a shame, because the premise of Ella reading this manuscript is a strong one. It just never quite pays off the way the Rumi and Shams material does.
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