I Who Have Never Known Men
***THE RUNAWAY BESTSELLER***
"Each revelation is a small miracle."--The New York Times
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 essential addition to the growing canon of feminist speculative literature.
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Readers say *I Who Have Never Known Men* is a haunting, philosophical exploration of humanity and isolation through the eyes of a nameless protagonist...
I don’t know what it was, but I couldn’t appreciate this story for what it posed to other audiences. I found it demoralizing, dehumanizing, and a lot of pages with no propellers. Sure, it makes you think. It poses questions about how you view freedom, and what it means to be free, and how one can grieve something they’ve never known. The pandemic of loneliness, what one does to survive and what that could look like. I know this was supposed to be poetic and thought-provoking but I wanted answers and I wanted connection. Neither of which I got.
Perhaps the contents were too profound for me, but I felt like there were a lot of words with and not a lot to gain; unless you were looking for a questioning of one’s ability to survive loneliness and the body you’re unfamiliar with, weird sexual revelations, and a lingering sense of foreboding. A heavy read with nothing to show for it on my end. The only question I’m asking myself now is why? Why write and read this book when literally nothing happens? Philosophically or otherwise?
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