I Who Have Never Known Women
by Jacqueline Harpman
Forty women are held underground for reasons no one can explain. They don’t know why they’re there, how long they’ve been there, or what’s happening above. The youngest of them has no memory of life before the cage. When they escape, what they find is somehow emptier than what they left behind.
“I had no past, only an eternal present from which I could not escape.”
What It Actually Felt Like
Short enough to read in close to one sitting, which is the right way to experience this book. It’s about what it means to be human when everything that supposedly makes you one has been stripped away. The narrator is building a self from almost nothing, learning emotion by watching the women around her, trying to understand what she’s missing.
It’s quiet and haunting and the ending doesn’t tie anything up neatly. I went in expecting something different and left more thoughtful than I’d anticipated. The questions it leaves you with don’t go away quickly.
The Honest Part
The pacing is slow and deliberate. If you need things to happen this one will test your patience. But if you can surrender to the atmosphere it rewards you.
Who This Is For
Readers who like quiet, philosophical speculative fiction that asks big questions without rushing to answer them. Read it when you have mental space to sit with it afterward.
⭐⭐⭐⭐ Stayed with me longer than expected.
Tags literary fiction, speculative, philosophical, translated, Belgian lit, mood: quiet and haunting
