I Who Have Never Known Men

There’s no continuity and the world I have come from is utterly foreign to me. I haven’t heard its music, I haven’t seen its painting, I haven’t read its books, except for the handful I found in the refuge and of which I understood little. I know only the stony plain, wandering, and the gradual loss of hope. I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct.

Highly recommended from me. This book is sort of a melancholy post-apocalyptic coming-of-age survival story, but with a dreamlike tint. It's uncompromising in not giving any pat answers to any of its questions. Why are these women here? Where has everybody else gone? Is this even earth? I feel like it explores a lot of ideas around trauma and knowledge and purpose, but at its heart I feel like it's really getting at what it means to be human when you are disconnected from past social structures but also disconnected from hope for the future.

This book shall be my go-to reference for enjoyable stories that leave you with no answers for what is going on. We don't even know if they're on earth or not. Everything written in the book is learned through the main character who has never known life outside of the bunker. It adds an extra flair of surrealism as she gets to see and witness all these new things that the other women with her took for granted.

This copy contains an afterward referencing Jacqueline's family having to flee their home during the Nazi invasion and the likelihood that the other bunkers full of dead bodies was influenced by the concentration camps. This added an entirely new level to the book for me.

Another audiobook that was well-done. The narrator did a really great job at conveying the innocence that the MC would have had due to not knowing the world and that information being held from her because what's the point in teaching it since they will all die in the bunker and she will never experience a semblance of what life once was.

This is one that I will be buying a copy of. Highly recommend.

Expect only questions, no answers from this book.

Have you ever read one of those stories where after the apocalypse, or maybe on an uninhabited island, one person is left, seemingly the only person left alive at all? And the whole story arc is about them dealing with loneliness and trying to find another human? Usually they do, usually one of the opposite sex, the implication being that they'll procreate, thereby solving the loneliness problem for at least two generations. Have you ever thought about that second generation? The siblings who will either have to resort to incest or dying out one by one? I often did. I wondered what it would be like for the last sibling, truly the last person on earth now.

I Who Have Never Known Men is about that last person, an account of her life, and it's as bleak as you would expect it to be. Everywhere this is grouped as a feminist novel, which I think is a bit shallow. Sure, the topic of gender comes up, and all the characters are women, but it's one of those stories were if the genders were flipped, if it was about a sole male surviving the apocalypse, no one would see that as a statement on gender. Really, in my opinion, it's about the meaning of life, and how much would be left of it without the rest of humanity. What use are the women's attempts at rebuilding a semblance of their previous lives, at finding out why what happened to them happened to them, at passing down knowledge to the one child among them, if there are no other people to share it with, no next generation to pass it down to? The pointlessness is soul-sucking. And it never abates.

It takes a special kind of person to enjoy a book like this, but if you like bleak, questioning, open-ended narratives, with the grace to be short reads, you should definitely give this one a try.

I only found out that the author is Jewish during the epilogue, but as a Jewish man myself, I could not ignore the, concentration camp taken to extreme, premise of the novel.
Written at the end of the 20th century, I Who Have Never Known Men, takes the worst excesses of said century's totalitarian ideologies and makes them worse.
The victims of the camps at least knew about the ideologies that marked them as enemies and treated them so. They could also hope for a better future. Harpman takes even these small glimmers of sanity away from these women.
The question weather they are still on Earth was also an aspect that spoke to me as a Jew. As Jews tried to come to terms with the Holocaust, at first there was a feeling that the events of the Holocaust were so horrifying that they could not have happened in our world, that they happened in a different world, on a different planet.
Yehiel Dinur, who wrote some of the earliest novels about the Holocaust under the name: Ka Tzetnik, famously referred in his testimony at the Ichman trial to the events that he witnessed in Auschwitz as happening on another planet, on Planet Auschwitz.
It is hard to view his testimony without seeing how the ideas behind it surely influenced Jacqueline Harpman.
Summery of his Testimoney from Wikipedia:

" I do not see myself as a writer who writes literature. This is a chronicle from the planet Auschwitz. I was there for about two years. The time there is not the same as it is here, on Earth. (…) And the inhabitants of this planet had no names. They had no parents and no children. They did not wear [clothes] the way they wear here. They were not born there and did not give birth... They did not live according to the laws of the world here and did not die. Their name was the number K. Tzetnik."

Futures bleak and severe dappled with strange liberations. "I have loved you so much," she said - my far-away favourite character in the book, but that, of course, was by design - and I did cry a little (a lot). I read through it with blazing interest, and short and quickly digestible as it may have been, it is still a taste that will linger for a long while. It's a book that will peek into my thoughts even when I finish other, new ones. Maybe it will never go away? I understand that, in many ways, it is not for me, but I am here for it anyway. I'm here for the art, the endless grey voyage, and the stars up high which (I think) are for everyone. Well, I'm not here to disturb. Just to understand. I like to understand things. She will never tell you what to think. Like poetry, you will have to understand it in a way that will be unique to you. I loved it.

The questions this book makes you think about, beyond the mystery of the story itself, are what make this book a thought-provoking one. You end up considering what makes us human if you strip away most culture, education, and technology. You wonder what you would do in this situation over and over again. You wonder what kind of purpose life would have or what purpose you could give it in this scenario.

Sometimes it got a bit dull with the level of detail about calculations she was making or the intricacies of the schedule. The nature of the story also makes it a bit repetitive at times. She names multiple other women but they all blur together for me except for Anthea.

I enjoyed the introspective style. I love being inside a character’s head - even more so when it’s someone who thinks so differently because of her extreme circumstances. Harpman makes good use of her narrator’s perspective because she challenges the norms that the rest of the women miss or want to recreate, like privacy on the toilet. The narrator doesn’t remember anything different, so doesn’t feel the same way about it, and you wonder where the need for privacy came from. When did that first come up in human history?