Three Daughters of Eve
by Elif Shafak
This is the fourth book I have read from Shafak, and I am always left intrigued by her work. While I was immensely bored by the last book of hers that I read (The Architect’s Apprentice), the other two have been among my favourites (The Bastard of Istanbul and Forty Rules of Love). Her work encompasses elements that I find very interesting: spirituality, duality existing in a person, uncertainty, the boundaries of faith and doubt, and what happens when they intersect.
This latest book, Three Daughters of Eve, will have you believe with its title that it is a story of three women but, mostly, it is really a story of one woman, and two other women that she meets in her life, but these characters are never in the limelight. The three daughters in question are Peri, Shirin and Mona, described as the Confused, the Sinner and the Believer, and those epithets can give you a broad idea about the general direction this book takes. Shafak uses this trifecta to dissect themes like: role of religion in the modern world, especially Islam, friendship and resentment. The themes explored, plus the structure of the novel clicked with me, for two very big reasons.
Firstly, it is set in a university for the bulk of its length. I have a soft spot for academia set stories as I loved university life (only been four years since I graduated but I miss it every single day, less and less each passing day, but the wound is still there). The novel gives a pretty good overview into the life of a freshman student in Oxford, not necessarily very detailed, but enough that I was hooked. That was not the major point of the book, but the setting helped nail the landing for me.
Second, and more importantly, the book is about uncertainy. Standing between faith and doubt and not knowing which side to choose. The protagonist is Peri and she is uncertain throughout her life, always caught between dualities, her mother and father, her two friends, even in her own mind she has never held one thought unflinchingly, convincingly. All this comes to a plateau when she is made familiar to an enigmatic, intellectually profound professor of philosophy named Azur who teaches, simply, about “God”, not religion, but “God”. Her interactions with Azur make for the central plot point of the whole novel.
The book is a bit long, touching close to 400 pages, but I was not bored at all. The pages flew by because I was involved in the story thoroughly: I am uncertain in my convictions, I will admit, and I related to Peri a lot. Plus it has one of the closest depictions of introversion that I have had the chance to read in a novel. Peri can’t understand why she is the way she is, always torn between wanting to be an extrovert and like others, but can’t. It made for fascinating reading.
In conclusion, grand ideas are explored in this book with trademark Shafak elements like references to Sufism, dichotomy of faith and doubt, uncertainty in this world, place of religion in the 21st century, and unrequited love. While it did not end as satisfactorily as I wanted it to, and it did make a few narrative choices that I could have done without (Peri’s backstory went a bit too far with its “tragic”-ness, for example), nonetheless, I liked this very much and am looking forward to what Shafak does next.