That’s the most positive thing I can come up with about this book. What a slog this was.
The plot: Ella Rubinstein is a forty year old stay at home mother to two children and a possibly perpetually unfaithful husband. She takes up a job with a publishing house to revise a novel called Sweet Blasphemy by a man named Aziz Zahara. As she reads the novel, she becomes fascinated by the story of the novel, about the friendship between renowned 13th century poet Rumi and his muse, Shams of Tabriz. Simultaneously, Ella finds herself falling for Aziz, with whom she strikes up a correspondence. In a parallel world, we read about Rumi and Shams and the way their relationship progresses.
Honestly, if you’re the sort of person who thought Eat Pray Love was fabulous but a little too commercial, try this one. It has a thin plot that barely veils a collective of trite life lessons. The characters in the novel are all paper thin pastiches that serve as plot devices for a philosophy that didn’t resonate with me at all. The writing is wooden and clumsy, though in all fairness that might be a translation issue or due to the fact that 99% of what I read hails from Germanic literature and this is just a different style that I’m not used to.
And it is a shame, because the story of Rumi and Shams – real historical figures – is a fascinating one, but we never really see it blossom in a way that holds the attention. Instead, we have Shams charming the pants off almost everyone he meets save for the dumbest, most boorish members of society in what I’ve come to call the Sara Linton Effect , where the author clearly likes a character better than most of their audience does. Shams’ forty rules of love are imparted with help of a collective of townspeople, some good (the repentant prostitute with a heart of gold) and some bad (the aggressive #NoHomo lout), and that’s exactly what it reads like: a list of forty rules about which I could not possibly care less. Likewise, the modern-day sections feel like a portrait from a self-help novel. There is no life in Ella and her life as a stay at home mother to a man with a successful career is a string of cliches; Aziz, likewise, is merely a vessel for stupid, superficial life lessons to be imparted when in reality, if you met a man like him you’d be bored out of your mind because nobody likes a self-important bloviator.
Yes, I really hated this book. I don’t think I’ve hated anything quite as much as I hated this one in a long time. And it wasn’t even a fun hate-read.
