![]() Having entered the bunker as a small child, considerably younger than her counterparts, it is immediately assumed that she has been placed with her fellow prisoners by accident. At the novel’s start she is a young girl, aged roughly fourteen or fifteen, and is being held against her will along with thirty-nine other women in a cage in some sort of underground bunker, as they has been for some time, for reasons entirely unknown to them. ![]() ![]() Our narrator is someone who, as the title would suggest, has never known men. At one point, the main character describes a scene before her as ‘incredibly strange, sinister and moving’, and that is exactly how I would describe the experience of reading this book. Having been so engrossed by Harpman’s work here, this review is an attempt to capture its greatness, which is partly philosophical in nature, without revealing too much. ![]() ![]() Originally published in French in 1995 under the title Moi qui n’ai pas connu les hommes, this is an incredibly profound dystopian science-fiction novel that I was utterly impressed by. I Who Have Never Known Men is the first book by Belgian author Jacqueline Harpman (1929-2012) to be translated into English (2018). ![]()
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