I Who Have Never Known Men
Ursula K. LeGuin meets The Road in a post-apocalyptic modern classic of female friendship and intimacy.
Deep underground, thirty-nine women live imprisoned in a cage. Watched over by guards, the women have no memory of how they got there, no notion of time, and only a vague recollection of their lives before.
As the burn of electric light merges day into night and numberless years pass, a young girl-the fortieth prisoner--sits alone and outcast in the corner. Soon she will show herself to be the key to the others' escape and survival in the strange world that awaits them above ground.
Jacqueline Harpman was born in Etterbeek, Belgium, in 1929, and fled to Casablanca with her family during WWII. Informed by her background as a psychoanalyst and her youth in exile, I Who Have Never Known Men is a haunting, heartbreaking post-apocalyptic novel of female friendship and intimacy, and the lengths people will go to maintain their humanity in the face of devastation. Back in print for the first time since 1997, Harpman's modern classic is an important addition to the growing canon of feminist speculative literature.
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What does it mean to be human in a world where you’ve been deprived of what connects us most to humanity? In “I Who Have Never Known Men”, an unnamed narrator walks alongside this question as she emerges from the underground prison in which she has spent her entire life.
I was largely inspired by social media to read this book, and I’m glad that I did—it inspired many thoughts and questions that I’m still grappling with. I did enjoy the earlier chapters (which reminded me on “Piranesi”) more than the latter part of the narrative, but overall this will be a book I won’t soon forget.
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