Review: I Who Have Never Known Men

3/5 stars

I Who Have Never Known Men, by Jacqueline Harpman (1995)

Translated by Ros Schwartz

I finished this a while back and it's been tough to get myself to write about it... because I know a lot of people love it, and I think it's because they feel it's really thoughtful and deep, in that Handmaid's Tale kind of way that says something about our misogynistic culture. And I'm not saying they're wrong. It just didn't speak to me in that way. But I really liked it for the ways it talks about female relationships, solitude, and ingenuity when faced with nothingness.

As the book begins, the female narrator is at the end of her life, living alone, and writing out her story. We then jump back in time to her childhood. She remembers nothing before the cage. She and 39 others - all adult women - lived locked in a cage with no privacy (open toilet in the middle of the room, for example) in a bunker deep underground. They are guarded by men who never interact with them beyond giving them food, occasionally medicine, and cracking a whip whenever the women do something that is against the rules - like touching each other in any way.

The 39 women all had normal lives before the cage, but no memory of how or why they came to be in the cage, and their memories of normalcy have begun to fade as well. The narrator, who has no name and is simply called "the child," tries to learn about the world by asking questions, but is usually met with silence, or by a comment like, "what would you need to know that for," - i.e. there's no use for that information anymore, because we'll be stuck in this bunker for the rest of our lives.

Everything changes when one day, as a guard is in the process of opening the cage to deliver food, an alarm goes off and all the guards run out of the bunker, leaving the keys dangling in the cage door. The women escape to the world above-ground - a desert with no sign of life. No sign, even, of where the guards may have disappeared to. "The child," being the youngest and least afraid of the outside world, becomes a leader in the group, helping them to survive in their new desolate landscape.

We know from the get-go that the narrator is alone, so it shouldn't be a surprise that she never really finds where "the rest of the world" is. Still, you keep hoping. As she finds small signs of life, you hope it will lead to someplace inhabited, with people that can explain this world, and how the women ended up where they did. But if you want things to be wrapped up in a bow, this is not the book for you - because there are no answers. This is a book about finding out who you are at the end of the world. It's about female friendships, and being alone, and survival. But more than survival - it's about finding ways to maintain your humanity in impossibly bleak situations.

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