(Potential spoilers below)
This weekend I finished I Who Have Never Known Men, a speculative novel by Jacqueline Harpman, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it.
The story begins in a bunker where 40 women are being held under strict surveillance. None of them know how they got there, or where there even is. Among them is a young girl, the only one without any memories of life before captivity. One day, a siren blares, the guards panic, and in their rush, they leave the gate to the women’s cell unlocked. The women escape, but what awaits them is not freedom in any familiar sense – only a vast, barren landscape and the eerie discovery that they may be completely alone in the world. As they wander, they come across more bunkers just like their own – except in those, the occupants never made it out.
Much like The Aosawa Murders, I tore through this book, driven by a need to understand what was going on, only to realize that the mystery itself might be the point. The farther the women travel, the more each discovery destabilizes their hope. Every cabin they find seems to ask: was this escape a blessing, or just a slower death?
One thing that stayed with me most was the girl’s silent, persistent watching of the youngest guard. She stares at him, hoping he’ll acknowledge her – break from the mechanical detachment that defines their captors. He never does. And yet, when the chaos begins, it’s only their cell that’s left unlocked. I can’t stop thinking this wasn’t random. Maybe that young guard left the keys as a final, quiet defiance.
There are no children in any of the other bunkers. No signs of life elsewhere. What if this unlikely connection between two young people, made entirely without words, was the only act of rebellion the system couldn’t predict?
I’m still trying to piece together what this book stirred in me. It’s about survival, yes – but survival stripped of purpose, connection, even memory. What happens when you’re alive, but there’s no one to witness it? No history to return to, no future to build toward?
I keep thinking about the title: I Who Have Never Known Men. It’s not just about absence .. it’s about being untouched by a certain kind of power, desire, violence, maybe even language. Is the girl freer because she’s unmarked by what came before, or more lost because she has no reference point at all? I don’t know yet. But I think Harpman wanted it that way.
La Femme Curiosita 