Three Daughters of Eve
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Average rating3.5
An Indie Next Pick The stunning, timely new novel from the acclaimed, internationally bestselling author of The Architect's Apprentice and The Bastard of Istanbul. Peri, a married, wealthy, beautiful Turkish woman, is on her way to a dinner party at a seaside mansion in Istanbul when a beggar snatches her handbag. As she wrestles to get it back, a photograph falls to the ground--an old polaroid of three young women and their university professor. A relic from a past--and a love--Peri had tried desperately to forget. Three Daughters of Eve is set over an evening in contemporary Istanbul, as Peri arrives at the party and navigates the tensions that simmer in this crossroads country between East and West, religious and secular, rich and poor. Over the course of the dinner, and amidst an opulence that is surely ill-begotten, terrorist attacks occur across the city. Competing in Peri's mind however are the memories invoked by her almost-lost polaroid, of the time years earlier when she was sent abroad for the first time, to attend Oxford University. As a young woman there, she had become friends with the charming, adventurous Shirin, a fully assimilated Iranian girl, and Mona, a devout Egyptian-American. Their arguments about Islam and feminism find focus in the charismatic but controversial Professor Azur, who teaches divinity, but in unorthodox ways. As the terrorist attacks come ever closer, Peri is moved to recall the scandal that tore them all apart. Elif Shafak is the number one bestselling novelist in her native Turkey, and her work is translated and celebrated around the world. In Three Daughters of Eve, she has given us a rich and moving story that humanizes and personalizes one of the most profound sea changes of the modern world.
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Thanks to Bloomsbury USA and NetGalley for a chance to read and review this book prior to publication here in the U.S. This has not influenced my thoughts or opinions or about this book.
Three Daughters of Eve is a book told from Peri's point of view as the main character, and the bulk of the plot alternates between flashbacks to 2001 and snippets of everyday upper-class Turkish life in 2016. There are also some chapters that show Peri's family life and how that shaped her trajectory, which set the stage for what's to come.
For a while, you're not sure where the plot is building, other than Peri now lives in Turkey after leaving Oxford early, and you know that part of her leaving has something to do with a professor and a class she took. The book builds towards two climaxes – one in the 2001 timeline and one in the 2016 timeline.
While I liked this book and found it insightful, I disliked Peri as a character. I'm fine with unlikable characters, but I don't enjoy characters who don't take agency of their lives if given the opportunity. Some of her choices made no sense and perhaps can be chalked up to youth, but made her seem immature and underdeveloped. Additionally, there is a recurring but seemingly random mystical element that feels more distracting than revelatory, and when you find out the roots of this mystical plot device, you wonder why this was thrown in. It complicates relationships unnecessarily.
We spent an evening with Peri, who has an eventful night in modern-day Istanbul, from getting mugged in the streets to attending a fancy dinner party with the business elite. She's slowly unravelling as an incident triggers her to remember her past. We learn about her upbringing of being confused and torn between her mother's unquestioning Muslim faith and her father's cynical secularism. And we learn about her experiences as a student at Oxford, where she meets the two other “daughters of Eve” - Shirin and Mona - who are also Muslim, but represent polar opposites. They are drawn together by a controversial yet charismatic Professor, who's seminar on God challenges students of different faiths to engage in a dialogue beyond religion, by focusing on the elemental question of God.
I really enjoyed some of Shafak's writing about the dynamics, the violence, the wealth, the hypocrisies .. of modern day Turkey/Istanbul. But then it maybe got too plot focused, and fell a bit apart towards the end. It built so much towards a reveal at the end, but then didn't spend enough time in Oxford to really convince us of the professor's allure, or the bond between the three girls. Some elements also felt unnecessarily dramatic (the brother, the ending). And the praise of uncertainty, of being in the middle, and confused, felt a bit too over-designed.
