Book Review: The Forty Rules of Love
Intellect and love are made of two different materials. Intellect ties people in knots and risks nothing, but love dissolves all tangles and risks everything.
I’ve had to rewrite this book review. I was not satisfied with it. This books came at a time when I personally am in the middle of heartbreak. Therefore, to read a book about understanding what love truly is? Maybe it came at the best worst time for me.
It is, by all accounts a beautiful book. Take everything you think you know about love and throw it out of the window because this book covers all the bases: friendship, family, romantic love etc. it should be calm, peaceful tranquil. It is described as different levels, much like a river. To the unseeing eye those who look at a river see just one body of water but, the river has different currents of speed and strength, some are clearly seen on the surface, whilst others run deep. and that is how the character Shams of Tabriz describes Love and all its different forms.
Shams is one of our central characters because this book really is a book within a book. Shams lives inside the work of fiction our other central character, Ella, is reading as an assignment for her the publishing house she works for. Ella and her family, on the surface, seem to have everything they’ve ever wanted. A family, success, a large house and apartment in the city and holiday homes around the east coast. But she is unhappy with her life. She just doesn’t want to admit it. her husband, kind and successful, is having an affair. Or multiple affairs we don’t know, and Ella doesn’t want to know. But she knows he’s been having them. Yet it comes as a massive shock to her family (yes even her husband) when Ella files for divorce, leaves her comfortable life in the USA and journeys round the world for a man she has never met, but has irrevocably fallen in love with. The man who wrote the fictional tale of Shams.
Although this review is shorter than what I’d normally write. I must say that it is well worth the read. In an age where dating and relationships has moved online, the spirituality of love and spontaneity of relationships in this book is a welcome breath of fresh air. I’m not someone who believes in fate, destiny, or coincidences. But I do believe it can happen in the most unlikely of ways in the most unlikely of places, yet what is important in this book is that Love transcends everything, and, most importantly religion and our conceivable idea of ‘God’. Therefore if you happen to find yourself in a bookstore, give this book a go.