I Who Have Never Known Men Review
Can you be left feeling so fulfilled by something so empty?
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 5/5
Can you be left feeling so fulfilled by something so empty?
Before reading I Who Have Ever Known Men, I would have found this a very confusing question. Now, I understand it completely and the answer is ‘yes.’ For those who don’t know, I Who Have Never Known Men is a French novel by Jacqueline Harpman. The story follows 40 women locked inside an underground cage, the reason unbeknown to us and the narrator of the tale. That is as much as I will reveal about the story right now. If you have not yet read it, this is your chance to turn back and not ruin one of the best novels I’ve read in 2022.
Other people have likened I Who Have Never Known Men to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. On its surface, there are some resemblances but to boil down the complexities buried within the pages of Harpman’s novel like this is a shame. If you enjoyed The Handmaid’s Tale then I would definitely recommend I Who Have Never Known Men, but you will come away from the experience of reading it much more lost and hopeless than Gilead made us feel.
Jacqueline Harpman’s tale of loss, absence and intimacy begins in an underground cage where 40 women are kept prisoner. They have no memory of how they got there, how long they have been there or why this is now their lives. Silent guards patrol the cage, not even speaking to the women when they give them their food. The women have absolutely no privacy, are prevented from killing themselves and are not even allowed to touch each other. It is through the eyes of the youngest girl that I Who Have Never Known Men is told.
The unnamed narrator is a blank canvas compared to her counterparts. She is too young to remember a time before the cage and anything that goes with that. This means that while she demonstrates clear intelligence later in the novel, the other women often pity her naivety. Upon reading the brief description of the novel, I expected most of the story to take place in the cage. Just that was enough to intrigue me because I find stories that explore the intricacies of human emotions and connections fascinating. Well, I Who Have Never Known Men delivered this to me in a way I was not expecting.
While I was waiting for some Great Escape-like breakout to be our conclusion, I was caught off guard when it happened barely halfway through the novel’s beginning. Through what can only be assumed to be sheer luck, the door to the cage is left open when an alarm that has never been heard before sounds one day. The guards disappear, the women emerge from the underground cage and this is where the story really begins. It is at this point that you would expect some answers to all the questions that have been raised…but you never do.
After the women escape from the cage, they wander about the empty world they have been left in. For decades they search and settle, only ever discovering more prisons like their own. Unlike theirs though, no other prisoners were able to escape. The cages of these other women (and men) became their tombs and no matter how many they find, the discovery is always horrifying and heartbreaking.
I suppose that would be the perfect words to summarise I Who Have Never Known Men: horrifying and heartbreaking. It feeds into the fear of isolation as the years pass and each woman begins to die or even asks our young narrator to end their suffering herself. Delicately laid down between these intense moments are the narrator’s personal discoveries about her body and the only world she has ever known. Since the novel is told in the past tense, the narrator is a clear and calm voice for the events taking place and somehow that makes them even more haunting. A standout moment for me was when the narrator stares up at the night sky and becomes overwhelmed by its vastness. In all honesty, it possibly unlocked a new fear within me to be made consciously aware that the night sky is not just a blanket but an impossible void.
Both utopian and dystopian novels have given us certain expectations for these types of novels. Either you expect that the narrator will, at the last moment, find someone else in this vast world that might not even be Earth. Harpman even cruelly encourages this hope when the narrator finds an underground bunker filled with supplies and literature. Instead, it is just another tomb of questions. Or, even if you do not expect her to come across other people, you at least expect something to happen.
But nothing ever does.
Our narrator writes her last words as she prepares for her own death after a lifetime of searching both in a group and on her own. Not a single question is ever answered or discovery found that actually leads anywhere. The story and the voice that have been our only comfort simply fade away and leave us with a bittersweet feeling. There is no frustration, no anger – these are feelings we had at the beginning of the novel when there was nothing but furious curiosity. Somehow, the journey that Harpman takes us on dispels these emotions and leaves something akin to acceptance in their place.
Originally published on WordPress on June 21st 2022