Margitte's Reviews > Three Daughters of Eve

1st of February, 2018. MY REVIEW
(my previous message yesterday) I finished this book late last night and had to drive 800 km today, so did not have time to review it. Review will follow. This is a though-provoking, intense book. Loved the experience.

Istantbul. The city that encompassed seven hills, two continents, three seas, and fifteen millions mouths.

The book opened with wealthy 35-year-old Peri (Nazperi) who discovered that she is able to kill someone during a mugging. It is the most important metaphorical event in the book, since not only does it unleash her memories, but also her sense of liberation from herself and her family situation. She is a caring mother, an all-rounder for charity and social uplifting, yet once experienced the freedom of being a student at Oxford, England. She had two girlfriends, who suddenly resurfaced in her mind when an old Polaroid snapshot fell from her expensive handbag during the mugging. It would change her life.

But to get to the point where she finally turned towards a new destiny, she had to remember...the baby in the cloud of mist, her mother's new devotion to Allah, her brother's discovery of Marxism, her father's blasphemous devotion to science, while bombs exploded all around them in the city.

She had always suspected that if chewing-gum flavours were political regimes, peppermint would be Fascism – totalitarian, sterile, stern.

Her parents, Mensure and Selma Nalbantoğlu were like two different poles to their own planet. Divided into two zones, Selma was Dar al-Islam and Mensure Dar al-harp – the realm of submission and the realm of war.

As a young girl, the thought that she had to make a choice, once and for all, between her mother’s defiant religiosity and her father’s defiant materialism almost paralysed her. She learnt early on in life that there was no fight more hurtful than a family fight, and no family more hurtful than one over God.

It was the discovery of her brother Umut's books, by the police, that brought the first junction of despair, where her mental paralysis prevented her from choosing between 'right' and 'wrong'. Hakan, her second brother, was not much of a reader. The police had only one young man to arrest for being in possession of The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx, The Condition of the Working Class in England by Friedrich Engels, The Permanent Revolution by Leon Trotsky, Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck, Utopia by Thomas More, Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell and Kiss of the Spider Woman by Leonard Schrader.

Eight years of jail awaited Umut. It would be the final step to turn her parents into two very different directions, and her brother Hakan surpassing his mother in religious devotion.

Over the years, Mensur and Selma’s marriage had hardened into a hollow husk. Now the shell cracked wide open and they found themselves on separate sides of the rift. The air inside the house turned stifling, heavy, as if it had absorbed the sadness of its inhabitants. It seemed to young Peri that no sooner had the bees and the moths entered through the open windows, than they rushed in panic to fly out. Even those insatiable mosquitoes no longer sucked the Nalbantoğlus’ blood, for fear of ingesting their unhappiness.

Selma promised Peri that Hell was so deep, it took seventy years for a pebble to reach Hell underground. Selma said it was Mensure's destiny. Mensure made Peri promise to include a pickaxe in his grave one day so that he could dig a tunnel out of wherever he ended up.

Well, I’m not really heaven material, no? There are two possibilities: if God has no sense of humour, I’m doomed. Express train to hell. If He has one, there’s hope, I might join you in paradise. They say they have rivers flowing with the best wine!’

He was still fond of God though. Because He is lonely, Pericim, like me... like you. Besides, what was piousness other than selfishness in disguise. All prayers were always about 'me'. Protect me; give me money, give me a Ferrari, do this do that...!

God was like a Lego set. You could build an angry God, all-punishing; a peaceful God, all-loving; or maybe built nothing.

Mensure was all about science. Civilization was built on it and reason and technology, not on unfounded believes. Mensure believed that he and Peri belonged in his world.

God was a maze without a map, a circle without a centre; the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that never seemed to fit together. If only she could solve this mystery, she could bring meaning to senselessness, reason to madness, order to chaos, and perhaps, too, she could learn to be happy.

The photo confronted a secret from long ago...

It is Peri's paralysis that lead up to her relationships with her professor and two friends at Oxford. Four people stood together in the Polaroid. Shirin from Iran, Mona, the Egyptian-American, the feminist, Peri, the timid Turk. The three daughters of Eve, three young Muslim women: the Sinner, the Believer and the Confused, with their professor Azur.

Peri, the good person, befriended people she could relate to, like anybody else. Takes one to know one.

Whether men or women, it was always people with rough journeys in their pasts, uncertainty in their eyes and invisible wounds in their souls that intrigued her. Generous with her time and loyal to the bone, she befriended these select few with an unflagging commitment and love

That fateful night after the mugging, a psychic draw three figures on a napkin for Peri. Under the first one was written: ‘She Saw Evil.’ Under the second: ‘She Heard Evil.’ And under the third were these words: ‘She Did Evil.’

With her memories whirling in her mind and the machine guns raging in her nearby vicinity that night of the mugging, Peri finally came to a conclusion...

A last comment: the prose was so rich in textures and color, I just wanted you to experience some of it, without giving away too much of Peri's philosophical journey to find her own place in this world.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

PS. I did not understand the ending so well. Hence the four star rating.