Michael's Reviews > Three Daughters of Eve

This is a compelling tale of a woman, Peri (Nazperi), who gets shaken out of her stable, well-adjusted mode of upper-class living in contemporary Istanbul by a random mugging event and by the responses she surprises herself by making. Here’s the effective hook in the first sentence of the book:

It was an ordinary spring day in Istanbul, a long and leaden afternoon like so many others, when she discovered, with a hollowness in her stomach, that she was capable of killing someone.

She gets a lot of fulfillment as a mother, as a gracious partner to her affluent husband (a real estate developer), and as an all around do-gooder from charity work to routinely carrying treats for homeless cats:
A fine wife, a fine mother, a fine housewife, a fine citizen, a fine modern Muslim she was.
… Time, like a skillful tailor, had seamlessly stitched together the two fabrics that sheathed Peri’s life: what people thought of her and what she thought of herself. ..she could no longer tell how much of each day was defined by what was wished upon her and how much of it was what she really wanted.

Still in the first paragraphs, we are pitched a second curve ball in this additional foreshadowing:
It would therefore come as a surprise when, on a middling day, at the age of thirty-five, established and respected, she found herself staring at the void in her soul.

What Peri does that that day is hard to justify to her daughter, so she keeps it under wraps. In her soul’s ferment we can detect a liberating experience in becoming more of an active agent in her life. But the downside is that it opens some emotional doors to painful things in her past that she has banished from revisiting. These include family traumas from her childhood and from a bad outcome from when she was a college student at Oxford. I am a big fan of character development and development in general (aligning with a past career in biology), and I find a lot of insight here in how both the strengths and weaknesses set into one’s character in early challenges hold the key to adaptive change in the face of ongoing threats and hurdles in our present life.

In her childhood Peri took a hybrid path between the atheism of her academic father and the Muslim devotion of her mother, adopting a mode of respectful uncertainty about God’s nature and role in her life. When it came to terrible injustices in this world, such as the terrible fate of one of her brothers whose political activities ran afoul of a repressive regime in the 80s, she can’t understand how God can let undeserved suffering happen without intervening:
If He could not, He was not all-powerful. If He could, and still did nothing to help those in need, He was not merciful. …He was in imposter.

Instead of following paths of the extreme left and right of her brothers, she seeks the mental liberation and pathway to accomplishment in literature and languages. Under her liberal father’s encouragement, she succeeds in getting into Oxford, where she is both exhilarated and challenged. It was lovely to experience her success in getting past the culture shock and bonding with her two roommates. Together they make up the “Three Daughters of Eves”: Shirin the rebellious “Sinner” whose family escaped the repression of Iran, Mona the devout Egyptian-American, Muslin “Believer” who is also a feminist, and Peri, the timid and studious Turk who acknowledges her status as “Confused” with regard to religion and thus once again the hybrid. All three are shaken up by a seminar that explores in radical ways different conceptions on God and his possible existence which is run by the charismatic Professor Azur. We experience Peri’s mind soaring with the fascinating content of the studies and debate of this course, and but something happens that melts her wings and leads her to drop out and return home as the epitome of “going with the flow” and settle into mundane existence as a mother and housewife.

In the scenes of her life in the contemporary world, the need for accountability comes to roost in many forms. All day since the incident I referred to, Peri feels compromised as a model for the moral development of her daughter, who never knew she was once an ambitious scholar at Oxford. Her mind’s flights during a dinner party with her husband’s circle of affluent business leaders and professionals has her in a struggle I would call a crisis of conscience. She has done something cruel and damaging to another in her youth, and she needs to find a path to self-respect. The talk is of the perils of terrorism, problems over the vast influx of refugees Turkey was taking in, the helpless feeling of fighting rising Islamophobia, and growing sympathies in the direction of a conservative nationalist agenda. In response to the sad results of the “Arab Spring” uprisings, one of her husband’s colleagues suggests that democracy was a luxury not worth pursuing. The sense of accepting the bad cards dealt one like inevitable fate is no longer the philosophy she can accept in this dangerous world.

I loved this late blooming of a woman trapped and suckered into a submissive position in an ostensibly modern and secular society. Much food for thought in a well-told tale. Personally, it represented a nice complement to a recent read of Bettany's history of Istanbul through the epochs of the Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman Empires (Istanbul: A Tale of Three Cities. I look forward to finding more works of Safak in translation, which includes 9 novels and 4 works of non-fiction. The book was provided by the publisher for review through the Netgalley program.