I Who Have Never Known Men

I Who Have Never Known Men / Jacqueline Harpman
trans. from the French by Ros Schwartz
Transit Books, 2022, c1995.
175 p.

It seems like everyone is reading this book right now! It is an unusual read, a dystopia that is vague and horrifying because of this very looseness of detail. 

There are 39 women and one young girl in a cage underground. They are being kept prisoner for an unknown reason, with armed male guards who don't speak to them. The women remember a life before, but can't quite recall why they were imprisoned or how exactly it happened. The young girl remembers only this life. 

But one day, chance offers the opportunity for the women to escape, and they do -- into a bleak and unfamiliar world above. It's never clear where it is: a damaged Earth, or another planet altogether. Why they are imprisoned, when and how it happened, that's not clear either. Nothing is really explained. And so we are in the same predicament as our narrator, the young girl who only knows this world. 

It's a bleak story of survival, as the group of women wanders the surface for many years, discovering other underground bunkers but no further survivors. And being so much younger than all the other women, our narrator eventually finds herself alone and wandering this landscape, finding out small things that may help to explain her life. She ends up in another bunker, this one very different from where she started. It is luxurious, she stays there. But the last line of this book will shake you. 

It's a read that you have to be ready to go into knowing there will be no explanations, no neat conclusions. But there will be atmosphere galore, and deep questions of meaning and relationship and existence. This book has haunted me since I finished it. Dare you to read it too!