Moi qui n'ai pas connu les hommes

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.

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?