The Power of the Rose (Contemporary Passages Novel)
Lady Jessica Tarley, a respectable widow, should not find Alistair Caulfield attractive. Aside from his reputation as a free-loving gigolo, Jessica has a vivid memory of Alistair that stirs up some very unladylike compulsions. Unexpectedly reunited aboard a Jamaica-bound ship, their close quarters make avoiding each other difficult—and such sexual denial makes Alistair want Lady Jessica all the more. They were all inspired by this steamy cruise ship historical! Books Like Fifty Shades of Grey.
For her 30th birthday, the virginal Amanda Briars has promised herself the ultimate gift: A night of bed-creaking, deflowering passion. A sexy romance between a notorious rake and a free-spirited spinster, Suddenly You will have you suddenly needing a splash of cold water. To be seen with him is to commit social suicide—but yet, the widowed Beth Ackerly hardly cares.
We tend to think that as human beings we have made amazing progress throughout the centuries. And we like to think that the women in the West are emancipated whereas women in the East are oppressed all the time. It is true that we have made progress but in some other ways we are not as different from the people of the past as we like to think.
Also there are so many things in common between the women in the East and the women in the West. It is not solely the problem of some women in some parts of the world. Basically, as I was writing this novel I wanted to connect people, places, stories—to show the connections, some obvious, some much more subtle. How would you explain the extraordinary popularity of Rumi in the West right now? What is it about his poetry—and his spirituality—that readers find so engaging?
It is a very inclusive, embracing, universal voice that puts love at its center. No one is excluded from that circle of love. What aspects of Sufism do you find most appealing and relevant to contemporary life? Do you have a sense that the mystical strands of Islam—represented by Shams of Tabriz in the novel—are beginning to balance out the more fundamentalist views—represented by the Zealot—in contemporary Islamic cultures? Mysticism and poetry have always been important elements in Islamic cultures.
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This has been the case throughout the centuries. The Muslim world is not composed of a single color. And it is not static at all. It is a tapestry of multiple colors and patterns. Sufism is not an ancient, bygone heritage. It is a living, breathing philosophy of life. It is applicable to the modern day. It teaches us to look within and transform ourselves, to diminish our egos. There are more and more people, especially women, artists, musicians, and so on, who are deeply interested in this culture.
Could you talk about your own spiritual practice and its relation to your creative work?
Also there are so many things in common between the women in the East and the women in the West. Or that the force of gravity works? It is also that no change in doctrine or in political alignment can ever be admitted. In Turkey the novel was an all time bestseller. One thing I do ne Milo Crane I sort of adore you. She squealed into the parking garage and nearly ran over a man in a wheelchair. The problem in Eco's universe is not the hidden room or its contents but in the attitude of people towards it.
My interest in spirituality started when I was a college student. At the time it was a bit odd for me to feel such an attraction. I did not grow up in a spiritual environment. My upbringing was just the opposite, it was strictly secular. And I was a leftist, anarcho-pacifist, slightly nihilist, and feminist, and so on, and so were most of my friends, and there was no apparent reason for me to be interested in Sufism or anything like that.
But I started reading about it. Not only Islamic mysticism but mysticisms of all kinds, because they are all reflections of the same universal quest for meaning and love. The more I read the more I unlearned. Unlearning is an essential part of learning, in my experience.
- PASSAGES / POWER OF THE ROSE [6-BK / 6-WB / 1-TG];
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We need to keep questioning our truths, our certainties, our dogmas, and ourselves. This kind of introspective thinking, to me, is healthier than criticizing other people all the time. Has that reception differed significantly from how American readers have responded to the book? It was amazing, and so moving.
In Turkey the novel was an all time bestseller. There was such positive, warm feedback from readers, especially from women readers, of all ages, of all views. Often the same book was read by more than one person, by the mother, the daughters, the great-aunt, a distant cousin.
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The story reached different audiences. When the novel came out in Bulgaria, France, America, and Italy, I had similar reactions, and I still receive touching e-mails from readers around the world. In other words they share their personal stories with me.
And I find that very humbling, very inspiring. Did your perception of Rumi and of Shams change in the course of writing about them? Returns now completed of the output of all classes of consumption goods show that the standard of living has risen by no less than 20 per cent over the past year.
All over Oceania this morning there were irrepressible spontaneous demonstrations when workers marched out of factories and offices and paraded through the streets with banners voicing their gratitude to Big Brother for the new, happy life which his wise leadership has bestowed upon us. Here are some of the completed figures. It had been a favourite of late with the Ministry of Plenty. It was the type that seemed to flourish best under the dominion of the Party.
His voice, made metallic by the amplifiers, boomed forth an endless catalogue of atrocities, massacres, deportations, lootings, rapings, torture of prisoners, bombing of civilians, lying propaganda, unjust aggressions, broken treaties. It was almost impossible to listen to him without being first convinced and then maddened. At every few moments the fury of the crowd boiled over and the voice of the speaker was drowned by a wild beast-like roaring that rose uncontrollably from thousands of throats.
Before the Revolution they had been hideously oppressed by the capitalists, they had been starved and flogged, women had been forced to work in the coal mines women still did work in the coal mines, as a matter of fact , children had been sold into the factories at the age of six.
But simultaneously, true to the Principles of doublethink, the Party taught that the proles were natural inferiors who must be kept in subjection, like animals, by the application of a few simple rules. In reality very little was known about the proles. It was not necessary to know much. So long as they continued to work and breed, their other activities were without importance. To keep them in control was not difficult. A few agents of the Thought Police moved always among them, spreading false rumours and marking down and eliminating the few individuals who were judged capable of becoming dangerous; but no attempt was made to indoctrinate them with the ideology of the Party.
It was not desirable that the proles should have strong political feelings. All that was required of them was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working-hours or shorter rations. And even when they became discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontent led nowhere, because being without general ideas, they could only focus it on petty specific grievances.
The larger evils invariably escaped their notice. Not a word of it could ever be proved or disproved. The Party claimed, for example, that today 40 per cent of adult proles were literate: The Party claimed that the infant mortality rate was now only per thousand, whereas before the Revolution it had been —and so it went on.
It was like a single equation with two unknowns. It might very well be that literally every word in the history books, even the things that one accepted without question, was pure fantasy.
The hypnotic eyes gazed into his own. It was as though some huge force were pressing down upon you—something that penetrated inside your skull, battering against your brain, frightening you out of your beliefs, persuading you, almost, to deny the evidence of your senses. In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy.
The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable what then? It was their final, most essential command.
His heart sank as he thought of the enormous power arrayed against him, the ease with which any Party intellectual would overthrow him in debate, the subtle arguments which he would not be able to understand, much less answer. And yet he was in the right! They were wrong and he was right. The obvious, the silly, and the true had got to be defended. Truisms are true, hold on to that! The solid world exists, its laws do not change. Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. One literally never saw them except in the guise of prisoners, and even as prisoners one never got more than a momentary glimpse of them.
Nor did one know what became of them, apart from the few who were hanged as war-criminals: It had no caption, and represented simply the monstrous figure of a Eurasian soldier, three or four metres high, striding forward with expressionless Mongolian face and enormous boots, a submachine gun pointed from his hip. From whatever angle you looked at the poster, the muzzle of the gun, magnified by the foreshortening, seemed to be pointed straight at you.
The thing had been plastered on every blank space on every wall, even outnumbering the portraits of Big Brother. The proles, normally apathetic about the war, were being lashed into one of their periodical frenzies of patriotism. But you could not have pure love or pure lust nowadays. No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred. She believed, for instance, having learnt it at school, that the Party had invented aeroplanes. In his own schooldays, Winston remembered, in the late fifties, it was only the helicopter that the Party claimed to have invented; a dozen years later, when Julia was at school, it was already claiming the aeroplane; one generation more, and it would be claiming the steam engine.
And when he told her that aeroplanes had been in existence before he was born and long before the Revolution, the fact struck her as totally uninteresting. After all, what did it matter who had invented aeroplanes?