I Who Have Never Known Men
SynopsisPlot
Deep underground, thirty-nine women live imprisoned in a cage. Watched over by guards, the women have no memory of how they got there, no notion of time, and only a vague recollection of their lives before. As the burn of electric light merges day into night and numberless years pass, a young girl—the fortieth prisoner—sits alone and outcast in the corner. Soon she will show herself to be the key to the others' escape and survival in the strange world that awaits them above ground.
Story
About this book
Forty women are held in an underground cage with no explanation. Thirty-nine of them carry faint memories of a previous life, but the fortieth, the youngest, was born into captivity and has never experienced anything else. She is the narrator, and her account unfolds from a position of radical absence: no knowledge of seasons, of open sky, of physical intimacy, or of ordinary human routines. The guards who watch over the prisoners are uniformed men who offer no information and enforce strict separation. Time in the cage is unmarked, with constant electric light erasing any boundary between day and night.
When circumstances eventually allow the women to leave their confinement, they emerge onto a barren, largely empty Earth. The landscape above ground provides no ready answers about what happened to the world or why they were imprisoned. Survival becomes the group's new occupation, and the narrator, lacking any template for normal life, must piece together what human connection, grief, desire, and purpose feel like by observing the older women around her.
Jacqueline Harpman, a Belgian novelist and psychoanalyst, originally published this novel in French. The story operates in a spare, speculative register, concerned less with the mechanics of its catastrophe than with what remains of inner life when nearly every external reference point has been stripped away.
