Three Daughters of Eve

by Elif Shafak

Like a magic wand in the wrong hands, the traffic turned minutes into hours, humans into brutes and any trace of sanity into sheer lunacy.

People who would refuse to share their bread shared their insanity instead. There was something inscrutable about the collective loss of reason: if enough eyes experienced the same hallucination, it turned into a truth; if enough people laughed at the same misery, it became a funny little joke.

witching hours, be immersed in a novel – reading being her way to connect with the universe.

In Istanbul, ancient though the city was, the past was treated like a visitor who had overstayed his welcome. Here in Oxford, it was clearly the guest of honour.

Her makeup was like the flag of an unstable country, declaring not only its independence but also its unpredictability.

‘I’ll tell you a universal rule: home is where one’s granny is.’ Peri smiled. ‘That’s nice.

‘When I look at you, I see a typical Oriental intellectual in the making,’ he had said. ‘In love with Europe, at odds with her roots.’ Why roots were rated so highly compared with branches or leaves, Peri had never understood.

reading. In many parts of the world you were what you said and what you did and, also, what you read; in

Falling in love was messy; falling out of love was even messier. All the emotions and the back and forth; the lunches, suppers and walks; then the quarrels over petty issues and the reconciliations. In short, placing another human being, if not at the centre of your life then somewhere close to it, was a lot of effort. She had no time for that.

There were different ways of growing of old, perhaps. Some withered first in body, others in mind, yet others in soul.

And that is where her quandary lay.

If I ever fall in love, she promised herself, it’ll be with someone’s brain. I won’t care about his looks or status or age, only his intellect.

men loved too much, raged too much, hated too much, always too much.

she enjoyed being around books, which gave her a sense of freedom as nothing else could.

By weakening our cognitive ability to put forth existential and epistemological questions about God and by severing our link with philosophers of times past, we were losing the divinity of imagination.

England has a peculiar way of making foreigners feel exhilaratingly free and depressingly alone.

But absolutism of all kinds is a weakness,’ Azur said. ‘Absolute atheism or absolute theism. To my mind, Peri, they are equally problematic. My task is to inject the faithless with a dose of faith and the believers with a dose of scepticism.’

The problem today is that the world values answers over questions. But questions should matter so much more!

‘Wherever we see a duality, we’ll smash it into tiny little pieces. We’ll make plurality out of singularity and complexity out of simplicity.’

figments of our imagination. The faces we see in the mirrors are not really ours. Just reflections. We can find our true selves only in the faces of the Other. The absolutists, they venerate purity, we hybridity. They wish to reduce everyone down to a single identity. We strive for the opposite: to multiply everyone into a hundred belongings, a thousand beating hearts. If I am a human, I should be big enough to feel for people everywhere. Look at history. Observe life. It evolves from simplicity to complexity. Not vice versa, that would be devolution.’

It was frightening the speed with which the shared past, like liquid pain, flowed into the silences of the present.

Motherlands are beloved, no doubt; sometimes they can also be exasperating and maddening. Yet I have also come to learn that for writers and poets for whom national borders and cultural barriers are there to be questioned, again and again, there is, in truth, only one motherland, perpetual and portable. Storyland.