Three Daughters of Eve
By Elif Shafak
Published Year : 2016
Page Count: 368 pages
Medium Used: Paperback
Genre : Spirituality, God, Romance, Young Adult, Oxford, 2024-read.
Rating : 5/5 🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳
Some spoilers ahead !!
When I finished the book and set it aside, I thought I will go with a maximum 4 star rating. Then I sat down to think and reason out what Elif Shafak is trying to convey through her work and it just blew my mind. She is a gifted writer with a propensity to convey so much more than what's visible on the surface. Her character development is impeccable and story pacing is flawless. The worlds she has built are very immersive and sucked me total into their spheres.
She ponders on bigger concepts of what is God's intent when bad things happen to good,innocent people and why doesn't he/she interfere in the act to stop it from happening. She brings an unique voice into the world of literature. I consider myself a deeply spiritual person and I got so addicted to the amazing world building in this book just like with her Forty Rules of Love. Islam and the teachings of Prophet Muhammad are not well known to me because I was born and raised a Hindu. But this book sheds a lot of light on some of those and I can't help but see the incongruity between the two religions. There are some who are dogmatic and fanatic about religion - those who say 'Yes' to all its dictats without reasoning and internal reflection. There are some who say 'No' and discard everyone of its teachings by embracing a total freewheeler attitude - which makes them devoid of a moral compass. Then there are others who don't fall into either category. They say neither Yes nor No but indulge in opening their minds to bigger questions in their quest for truth.
The three women in the narrative - the Sinner, the devout and the confused .. Shirin, Mona and Peri - are the three daughters of Eve. Shirin is the No person, Mona is the Yes person and Peri (the main character) is the one wavering in between. They are bought together by their education at Oxford College and their involvement with a certain professor's seminar - on God. He is someone who encourages them to ask any kind of question and not be bogged down by dogma and to expand their minds to the fullest. Peri finds a deep attraction to him and fantasizes about him a lot. Like the Forty Rules of Love, this relationship between the elderly professor and his impressionable, naive student is purely platonic. Something Peri does or doesn't do ruins the teaching career of Professor Azur and creates a gulf of silence between them for well over a decade. She leaves all her future plans in between her term, returns back to Istanbul in 2002 and gets married to a man Adnan, becomes a housewife and a mother.
The time line wavers between two periods .. one is the modern day 2016 where Peri is a guest at a party hosted by a rich Istanbul businessman and 2080s to 2002 covering her childhood with her deeply polarized parents, traumatized and raging brothers, to her education and break up with Professor Azur at Oxford. I think she cast a light on lot of customs and traditions that are followed by the Turkish people of Istanbul - both modern day and the past. She brought the times to life with her easy flowing descriptions. I was shocked and also flummoxed by many of the events - like how her brother is mistreated by the police, how her sister in law goes through deep humiliation before reconciling with her brother and how deeply divided her parents were!
I would love to give this book another go in the future..maybe gleaning something different and more nuanced next time. I swear I will read everyone of Elif Shafak's books. I have become an ardent fan to her thoughts and writing. Cheers!!
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