I Who Have Never Known Men (original: Moi qui n’ai pas connu les hommes) is a novel by Jacqueline Harpman. I read the English translation by Ros Schwartz.
Finished on: 14.5.2024

Plot:
39 women and a girl are in a cage underground, held prisoner by only male guards who never talk to them. They don’t know what happened or why they are there. They are reasonably certain that the girl is there by mistake, but she nevertheless has to grow up in the prison. One day, an alarm sounds and the guards flee. As luck will have it, the women manage to escape – but instead of answers, they find more riddles.

I Who Have Never Known Men is a poetic, sad and ambitious novel that is more interested in what happens when things are not resolved than in answering any questions. It seems like a cerebral book, but it is emotionally devastating.

Harpman’s novel sits on the intersection between genre/SFF and literary fiction. That is, it is clearly a speculative novel but it’s not actually interested in that speculative setting outside of what it means for her character to be in a situation where she is this deprived and answerless. Would it be an outright genre novel, it would probably explore the world in its own right more, and it might even offer some answers instead of just hinting at the possibility of answers if only our protagonist had made slightly different choices. Of course, there are many interpretations possible, many theories to be had, but they remain speculation.

What the book does is it gives us a character who somehow finds steadfastness within herself in the face of a world that remains a mystery. And she finds community almost despite herself and all of them with the women around her, although everything around them is designed to keep them apart in their captivity. Maybe it’s not important to know how we ended up where we are, and more important what we do from here on.

Harpman’s writing, or at least Schwartz’s translation, has poetic touches, but is also often rather plain, hitting just the right tone for its narrator. It makes the slim volume eerie and somehow larger than itself, while keeping it grounded enough to not have it float off into being unrelatable. In short, it is pretty amazing.

Summarzing: a book to think about for a while.