I Who Have Never Known Men

Pure five stars. Short but perfect book.

Forty women are locked in an underground prison and guarded by male guards for many years. They don’t know how long because they have nothing to measure time. They do not know why they are there or how they ended up there. All remember some details from their previous lives except one - our narrator. She remembers nothing from before because she was a child when they first came here. So she doesn’t know what normal means; a normal life outside this prison. Here in this bunker, they only have essential things: food, water, and electricity.

The novel explores what kind of person you would become if raised without culture and our basic knowledge. Our narrator is a person who was raised in isolation, had no means to basic education, and does not know social norms. She was raised with the rules from the bunker. Except for the guards, she has never seen men. She never spoke or interacted with one.

The author never explains many facts that we so much want to know. And there’s no need for explanation. This is the true beauty of the novel. 

Goodreads

Details:

• author: Jacqueline Harpman
  
• full title: I Who Have Never Known Men
  
• genre: literary fiction, dystopian
• format/type: bookfiction
• topics: #prisoners, #feminism
  
• publisher: Transit Books
• publish date: May 10, 2022
• pages:

My Rating of the Book:

• content: 💙💙💙💙💙

  

Excerpt from the Book:

About the Author:

Jacqueline Harpman was born in Etterbeek, Belgium, in 1929. Being half Jewish, the family moved to Casablanca when the Nazis invaded, and returned home after the war. After studying French literature she started training to be a doctor, but could not complete her medical studies when she contracted tuberculosis. She turned to writing in 1954 and her first work was published in 1958. In 1980 she qualified as a psychoanalyst. She had given up writing after her fourth book was published, and resumed her career as a novelist only some twenty years later. She has now written twelve novels and won several literary prizes, most recently the Médicis for the present novel. She is married to an architect and has two children.