Three Daughters of Eve

by Elif Shafak

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.

Compassion never came as an afterthought: it was either spontaneous or absent entirely.

In this city where everyone feared outsiders, most assaults came from those who were too familiar, too close.

How bizarre it was that the past came flooding in at the very moment disorder breached the banks of the present.

If her father’s physics had its universal rules, so did human psychology. The moment one was told not to enter the fortieth door or not to peek into a chest, that door was bound to be unlatched, that chest had to be prised open.

‘You know why I’m not that keen on heaven?’ ‘Tell me.’ ‘I look at the people who’ll go there, those who pray and fast and seem to do everything they’re supposed to do. So many of them are full of pretension! I say to myself, if these chaps are headed for heaven, do I really want to be there? I’d rather burn peacefully in my own hell. Hot it is, but at least there’s no hypocrisy.’

Was religion an empowering force for women who otherwise had limited power in a society designed for and by men, or was it yet another tool for facilitating their submission? The

She had come to learn that the English had an indirect way of expressing their opinions. Unlike the Turks, they did not communicate resentment through resentment or anger through double anger. No, there were layers to their conversation; the deepest discomfort could be conveyed with a reticent smile. They complimented when, in truth, they wished to denounce; they clothed their criticisms in cryptic praise.