I Who Have Never Known Men

Jacqueline Harpman
Completed 9/17/2026, Reviewed 9/17/2026
4 stars

My predisposition was against liking this novella.  It was last month’s online book club selection, but didn’t get a chance to read it before now.  The general feeling of the book was negative with a few dissenters.  If I had read it in time, I would have been a dissenter.  I thought this book was tremendous.  The author is Belgian and this is a new translation that has been achieving a cult following.  I found it highly readable, though dense.  When I got into the zone, I read one hundred pages in a night, the rest the following morning.    It’s post-apocalyptic from the point of view of a teenage girl who has no memory of the previous life, being just a toddler when the event occurred.  It follows her for the next forty-some-odd years.  And it’s not a happy book but it is an exploration of what it means to be human and a woman in a world turned upside down.

The book opens with an older woman writing about her experiences in this post-apocalyptic world.  She goes back to her earliest memories.  She was kept in a cage with thirty-nine women, all adults of various ages.  They do not know why they are caged, carefully monitored, and brutally beaten for infractions.  The thirty-nine have been in the cage so long that they don’t remember much of life before.  Their focus is on survival today.  The young girl is an outsider because of the age gap.  She has no name that she remembers.  One day, something akin to an air raid siren goes off and the guards run out.  It just so happens that they leave the key in the cage’s lock.  The women escape only to find a barren deserted landscape that might not even be Earth.

The unnamed narrator, having been kept separate from the rest of the women her whole time in the cage, thinks very differently than the women.  They have context, she has none.  She doesn’t understand anything, even her own body as we discover her puberty was stunted and she doesn’t menstruate.  It’s not until their escape that the eldest women begin teaching her about life, as well as math, reading, and some history.  As they journey looking for other survivors and a place to live, the narrator begins matching ideas and words with real things.  But still doesn’t feel as human as she perceives the other women.  But because of this, she finds herself capable of thinking outside the box enough to solve the problems they face in this empty world.  

There’s an afterward to this book which has some terrific statements about it.  The best is the summary, which I’ll quote here: ”It’s a philosophical treatise as much as a story about an alien world, one that prizes the humanity of its characters and places this humanity square, front and center, even in a disorientating landscape of total strangeness.  The prose is cool water.  Its images are lonely, weird, sometimes horrific, and always arresting.”

I couldn’t have said that better myself.  In the end, it’s about acknowledging the humanity in all of us, no matter how different we feel.  The narrator always felt different, like a new species of human.  It was her greatest asset but learning that she is human was her greatest lesson.  I give this book four stars out of five.