I Who Have Never Known Men — Jacqueline Harpman

This is a captivating and horrific story about love, life, and the search for meaning. It is hard to compare to anything else I have read. Calling it Kafkaesque makes sense, in its absurdity, but this book has no obvious answers, and yet it easily can speak to everyone. It has themes of meaningless and meaning, timelessness and time, love and loss, and what it means to be human, at the very core of that meaning.

The narrator and 39 other women live in a cage, in an underground bunker. They are watched over by three guards, who rotate in and out at what is later discovered to be irregular intervals. Their waking and sleeping periods are controlled, and irregular. One day, through a stroke of luck, they are able to escape, and find themselves alone in the barren grassy wilderness spotted with clutches of trees and occasional rivers. They wander, looking for others, and never find anyone else alive–the other prisoners, some women, some men, have all died of starvation or worse, locked in their cages. As time goes on, the women slowly die, or are brought to death in a gently gracious and loving manner by the narrator. Eventually, she is alone, and she wanders, searching for meaning in a meaningless life.

However, I don’t think her life is meaningless. The search for meaning, the drive to understand, that is a human aspect. It may be what makes us human. Trying to find patterns out of randomness, order out of the chaos, meaning where there really is none. We all make our own lives and our own meanings. This is, to my understanding at least, the heart of existentialism: the fact that we will eventually die puts hard boundaries on our life, thus giving it a limited time, and therefore meaning.

While published 30 years ago, apparently this book has only recently (in several waves) found its audience. My wife found out about it from TikTok, and she wanted to talk about it with me and wanted me to read it. I’m glad I did, and I’m looking forward to our conversations.

I am classifying this story as hard SF, because there is not a single thing in the story that couldn’t be true. At least the things that are known. But the story is really more than that. The epilogue claims it is not easily classifiable, and i agree. But it isn’t fantasy, and it isn’t horror (though the topics are horrific), and it doesn’t feel “literary,” whatever that term even means. I think it is important to note the authors Jewish heritage, and the obvious connection to the Holocaust. This story, at its heart, is grounded in control, patriarchy, and imprisonment for incomprehensible reasons.

The story is written entirely in first person perspective, through the eyes and ears of a girl, and then woman, who doesn’t belong with the others. She is truly alone, caught up in this nightmare, the fortunate freedom, hope, desperation, loneliness, and a continual search for meaning. The book ends with a long passage about how time is created only through the interaction of two people. Her existence only matters if she makes an impact on someone else, and since she is alone, she has not existence; there is no definition of time when you are and will always be alone.

This is one for the reread pile for sure.