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Part 5, Chapter 19
Themes and Colors
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Forty Rules of Love, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Love and Spirituality
Elif Shafak’s The Forty Rules of Love is about Ella Rubenstein, a woman who is about to turn 40 and feels like she has lost the romantic love from her life, if she ever had it to begin with. When she receives a manuscript called Sweet Blasphemy by a writer named A. Z. Zahara (Aziz) for her part-time job reading prospective novels for a literary agency, Ella starts to experience romantic feelings that she…
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Connections Across Distance and Time
In Shafak’s The Forty Rules of Love, Ella falls in love with Aziz, even though he lives on the other side of the world. Ella’s husband, David, sees her every day but becomes increasingly distant from her. Aziz, on the other hand, feels familiar to Ella before she even meets him in person. The struggles going on in Ella’s life parallel those going on in the younger generation, as Jeannette thinks that…
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Appearances vs. Reality
Many of the characters and situations in Shafak’s The Forty Rules of Love are not what they seem to be on the surface. Ella, for example, seems to be a successful woman. She works part-time for a prestigious literary agency, and she is married to a successful dentist, David, with whom she shares three children. But the reality is that her life is falling apart due to David’s affairs and to her own…
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Storytelling and Truth
Elif Shafak’s The Forty Rules of Love is a novel that contains stories within stories that help to convey the truth in unusual but vivid ways. In the frame story, Ella works for a literary agency, making her the modern version of someone in the storytelling business. As the author of Sweet Blasphemy, A. Z. Zahara (Aziz) also is a storyteller, and in his emails to Ella, he tells stories about his travel and…
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