I Who Have Never Known Men
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4.3 • 781 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Ursula K. LeGuin meets The Road in a post-apocalyptic modern classic of female friendship and intimacy.
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.
Jacqueline Harpman was born in Etterbeek, Belgium, in 1929, and fled to Casablanca with her family during WWII. Informed by her background as a psychoanalyst and her youth in exile, I Who Have Never Known Men is a haunting, heartbreaking post-apocalyptic novel of female friendship and intimacy, and the lengths people will go to maintain their humanity in the face of devastation. Back in print for the first time since 1997, Harpman’s modern classic is an important addition to the growing canon of feminist speculative literature.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
This spare and enigmatic feminist fable from a Belgian psychoanalyst drew comparisons to The Handmaid’s Tale when it was first published in 1995. The nameless protagonist grows up in a barred cell inhabited by 40 women who have committed no crime, constantly surveilled by male guards who never speak. Survivors of a societal breakdown whose causes are unclear, the women do not know why they’re being kept alive. The mystery only deepens when the guards suddenly depart one day, leaving the women to finally exit their prison for the strange new world outside. Powerful forces can and will control our circumstances without bothering to explain why, but we can find comfort in knowing that even in deprivation, a society can develop and individuals can still possess rich interior lives.
Customer Reviews
Not Bad
It was a great book, well written and captivating. [Spoilers] The lack of answers to their situation made the book fall a bit flat for me, I understand that the point of the book is not knowing but for me, the book lacked a point.
Good but not great
I’m very divided on this book. It’s got great philosophical moments and quotes, but the story itself I found lacking. I don’t need an author to lay everything out for me like I’m a baby, but to give me almost nothing and be like “be glad that it has good philosophy in it” is not enough. Believe it or not you can have both.
Power through understatement
Everything Mackintosh said in the Afterword :)