Review — The Forty Rules Of Love
Elif Shafak’s beautiful novel that heals with the transformative power of love and friendship
Let us choose one another as companions!
Let us sit at each other’s feet!
Inwardly we have many harmonies — think not
That we are only what we see.
In an open-air hall in Konya in the thirteenth century, sema, the dance of the whirling dervishes is performed for the first time. To the sounds of the ney and rebab, the dervishes spin, first slowly and then faster, their wide skirts opening up like lotus flowers. They point one hand up towards the sky and the other down to the earth, pledging to distribute every speck of love received from God to the people.
Elif Shafak’s description of the spell that this never-before-seen dance casts on the believers and skeptics in the audience transported me to the amphitheatre in Cappadocia where I had watched the same dance eight centuries later, mesmerized by the peace that flowed from the confluence of perfect harmony between humans and nature, tangled in the sweet web of unconditional love.
Magic never gets old. Neither do love stories.
Not just one love story
