In a burgeoning genre it’s unusual to find something original. In Harpman’s dystopia we meet a group of 40 women kept in a cage, their basic needs met by soldiers. The youngest is a child with no name and no remembered past. There is no intimacy, they are forbidden to touch and the days unravel, always the same. The nameless girl struggles to connect with her fellow prisoners, she doesn’t share their memories, doesn’t understand their jokes or reminiscences and they won’t explain. She is isolated and curious, paying close attention to everything happening around her. It is her attention that starts to change their environment and their understanding of what is happening. There’s no way to describe the plot more without spoiling it. It is bleak and troubling but there is great heart and warmth to it as slowly relationships form and develop between a large group of complex women in a horrific environment. The prose is sparse and powerful and the end is the ultimate gut-punch.

Due to a sudden, unexpected passing in the family a few years ago and another more recently and my subsequent (mental) health issues stemming from that, I was unable to download this book in time to review it before it was archived as I did not visit this site for several years after the bereavements. This meant I didn't read or venture onto netgalley for years as not only did it remind me of that person as they shared my passion for reading, but I also struggled to maintain interest in anything due to overwhelming depression. I was therefore unable to download this title in time and so I couldn't give a review as it wasn't successfully acquired before it was archived. The second issue that has happened with some of my other books is that I had them downloaded to one particular device and said device is now defunct, so I have no access to those books anymore, sadly.

This means I can't leave an accurate reflection of my feelings towards the book as I am unable to read it now and so I am leaving a message of explanation instead. I am now back to reading and reviewing full time as once considerable time had passed I have found that books have been helping me significantly in terms of my mindset and mental health - this was after having no interest in anything for quite a number of years after the passings. Anything requested and approved will be read and a review written and posted to Amazon (where I am a Hall of Famer & Top Reviewer), Goodreads (where I have several thousand friends and the same amount who follow my reviews) and Waterstones (or Barnes & Noble if the publisher is American based). Thank you for the opportunity and apologies for the inconvenience.

I Who Have Never Known Men is a lesson in futility; in relentless disappointments; in the reality that, no matter how much modern depictions have tried to tell us otherwise, most dystopias do not have a happy ending. In fact, even compared to most older dystopias, the book is nothing like I have read before, or will probably ever read again. It is jarring, disquieting, and profoundly saddening, made only more so because the real horrors of the novel do not come from the petty, cruel actions of a particular group of people - whether that be a certain race, class, gender or governmental organisation. Instead, they stem from the horrifying reality of these women’s lives after the ‘ruling class’ have left them behind; their aimless wanderings, their desire to find anything that resembles human civilisation (kind or otherwise) and their constant failure to do so, is where the growing terror creeps in.
After-all, at least you can fight back against tangible, physical monsters, human or otherwise. You can not fight yourself out of a situation when the reality of it is, is that there is absolutely nothing to fight against.
Nothing holding you down, nothing enforcing the rules.
Absolutely nothing at all.
In those scenes, I Who Have Never Known Men becomes, much like Toni Morrison’s seminal novel Beloved, an unending, spiralling tale of suffering and disappointments; a slow and dreary wind-down to an utterly empty and horrifying conclusion. It is a disturbingly haunting tale, not one to be recommended if someone is looking for something leaning towards the light and fluffy, or having a bad day mental health-wise. But one to be recommended for people who have growing questions and concerns about the environmental crisis… or rather, people who have no questions or concerns whatsoever, in an effort of shocking them into reality. Because, even though Jacqueline Harpman published this novel in 1995, as most dystopian novels have the tendency to do, more and more lessons from its pages need to be taken onboard.

This was an interesting take on the dystopian novel, and I enjoyed how the main character was at odds with the others in her group, and her environment, for the whole book. While the lack of answers was a bit frustrating, I did really admire the strangeness of the set-up. An intriguing book.

A woman has grown up imprisoned with a group of other women. She has no memory of a world outside their bunker.

Very readable dystopian novel which hits the ground running and does not stop until the conclusion. The plot is rather fast paced, and while the reader may have more questions than answers by the end, the journey is well worth it.

Harpman did a good job in carving out an original tale and a rather overcrowded genre.

Liked it a lot.

Would definitely pick up other books by this author.

With thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the ARC.

A fantastic read. Thrilling, à different and unique dystopian thriller which makes you want race through the book wanting to know more

This was a great dystopian type novel. I would not call this dystopian in the sense that we as reader identify as this was more like a character study and was an autobiography of one unnamed woman who talks about her life. The action was low level and thoughtful and it definitely touched on deeper questions than in other world-ending books. This is one i can see myself reading in a few years as it really makes you think about the human state.

Really simply told book that zips along. Sadly it doesn't really go anywhere but it did have something hypnotic about it . I read it in one or two big chunks but felt it ultimately didn't deliver.

The narrator (who has no name) was brought as a very young child along with 39 other older women to live in a "cage" in a bunker. Their days and nights are controlled by the dimming and turning up of lights. The cage is surrounded by a perimeter patrolled at all times by 3 guards who bnever speak or acknowledge the existence of the women but who chastise the women if they laugh, cry, talk too loudly or touch each other with precise and painful whip lashes. The women have nothing to do and no interests. Their only tasks are to communally cook the meagre rations of meat and vegetables that they are given each day to boil and to repair their threadbare tunics with scraps of fabric they are given. Our narrator who has shunned the other women as she feels they didn't care for her starts to ask questions of the lead woman and develops a method of measuring time using her heartbeat which starts to answer soe of her queries. One day a siren sounds just as the gate to the cage is being opened to give the women their food ration and the guards run off. The women get to go above ground and explore their surroundings.

I'm not sure what this book was about, perhaps the futility of life: trying to survive for just another similar day. How even with increasing comfort we get used to it and life is still not that fulfilling? I'm not sure. It was very interesting but a bit of a mystery.

I'm really glad this 1995 dystopian novel is being republished, otherwise it would have totally passed me by. The premise is simple: the novel opens with 39 women (and one young girl) imprisoned in a bunker, controlled by three male guards. But then something happens to change all this, and the women have to figure out how to survive on their own.

Eerie and quiet, the novel makes readers reconsider what it means to be alive and free to make decisions about one's own destiny. Recommended for fans of dystopian feminist fiction (fittingly a new introduction is written by Sophie Mackintosh, author of The Water Cure).

This is an interesting, but somewhat frustrating read. It opens with our unnamed narrator – one of a group of women imprisoned in a bunker and guarded by men. The other women remember something of life before, but our narrator does not. In essence, her whole life has been spent as a prisoner.

It is difficult to say more about this novel, without giving away what happens, and I have no wish to do that. Not that this is an action packed read; more a philosophical musing on what humanity means. However, I found this a somewhat uninspiring read, to be honest. That is not to say that it won’t inspire you as a reader, but I just found myself left with more questions than answers.

I would suggest that, should you read this edition of the book and are reading it as a novel, as opposed as for study, you leave reading the introduction until after you have read the book. It not only tells you about the author, and the background of the novel, but everything that happens. I received a copy of this book from the publisher, via NetGalley, for review.

I was forced to acknowledge too late, much too late, that I too had loved, that I was capable of suffering, and that I was human after all…

Belgian psychoanalyst and author Jacqueline Harpman (1929-2012) wrote over fifteen novels and won several literary prizes. I confess with some shame that I had never heard of her. Perhaps I might be forgiven considering the dearth of English translations of her works. In fact, Harpman’s 1995 novel Moi Qui N’ai Pas Connu les Hommes was the first to be translated into English (originally with the title Mistress of Silence) and, although I stand to be corrected, I believe that of her other novels, only the Prix Medicis prize-winner Orlanda is also available in English.

Mistress of Silence is being reissued by Vintage Books with the title I Who Have Never Known Men, in the translation by Ros Schwartz, a veteran translator from the French who was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2009. The novel’s premise is simple: in an undefined period in the near future, we meet forty women who are kept prisoners in a cage in an underground bunker, guarded by a group of armed men, and supplied with just the basic necessities of modern life – electricity, food, water and medication. Eventually, the women manage to escape, only to find themselves roaming what seems to be an uninhabited, post-apocalyptic alien world. The older women hazily but fondly recall a different “normality”, one in which they went around the daily business of life – working, falling in love, raising families. The unnamed narrator is a teenager who has only known life in the bunker. She has no other recollections and is aware that she will never share the experiences which the other women wax nostalgic about. She tries to learn about the past, only to realise that it will serve her no purpose in this strange environment where she will “never know men”.

This new edition of the novel is very clearly meant to capitalise on the current interest in feminist dystopian fiction and it is surely no coincidence that it features a new introduction by Sophie Mackintosh, author of The Water Cure. Female prisoners guarded by men, escaping to form a utopia in which they manage to survive without the opposite sex… it certainly is a plot which invites a feminist reading. Yet, as Mackintosh perceptively notes, the novel “is not necessarily extolling this kind of existence” and might even be suggesting that “this settling is the downfall of the women”. Perhaps it’s fairer to say that rather than seeking to ponder “what it means to be a woman” or, for that matter, “a man”, Harpman is more interested to explore what it is that makes us “human”. The older women have memories of life on Earth to remind them of their humanity – the narrator is, on the other hand, a blank slate, with no preconceived ‘social constructs’ apart from what she has vaguely gleaned from her fellow prisoners. She has to discover anew the meaning of an existence to which there appears to be no mapped-out purpose.

This novel raises striking philosophical concepts and provides much food for thought. Depending on the reader’s tastes, this could also be its weakness. In fact, this is, in my view, an example of a “novel as thought experiment”. We are given just enough narrative on which to append philosophical discourse. Interesting as that is, anyone looking for page-turning thrills will likely be disappointed. On my part, I felt short-changed by the lack of cogent explanations behind several basic elements of the plot. I like some ambiguity in a plot, but this novel possibly leaves too much to one’s imagination.

Yet, there’s no escaping the effectiveness of the novel’s bleak imagery, and I have this suspicion that it will remain with me for a long time.

This is a classic work of literary fiction that is at once bizarre and arresting, but also frustrating and philosophical.
Forty women in a cage, patrolled by male guards. This is their life. No changes, no differences. Then, a chance coincidence allows them to leave the cage. What they find, and how the eldest through to the youngest deal with and interact with the world they find themselves in, creates a masterpiece of chilling psuedo science fiction, a treatise on what it means to be human, and female. The novel constantly asks what it really means to be human - is humanity inherent or only an idea that is useful in context with others. Can you be human if you are utterly alone, and know no different from your own existence?
To a reader from modernity, we see the circumstances the women in are horrific, and are repelled by them. We relate to the women who have know differently, the women who know there was a Before, and an After. The narrator however knows only After. Does this change her essential humanity?
This book never really answers these questions, and never allows us to reach a conclusion on who, what, or how, but still manages to settle in your consciousness and will leave you pondering long after the last page.
Recommended for fans of Margaret Atwood, and perhaps Ursula Le Guin and Octavia Butler.

An enigmatic book, haunting and mysterious but ultimately frustratingly open-ended: if you're the kind of reader who needs to have things tied up and explained by the end then step away now - we have no idea why these women have been incarcerated in a bunker, who their male guards are, why the siren goes off, what has happened to the outside world, even whether they're still on earth...

What starts out with a dystopian feel turns into a kind of existentialist meditation as 'the girl', our nameless narrator, ends up as possibly the only woman left alive - without companions or much purpose other than staying alive in her threatless existence, the book asks what is human life? Ultimately more 'Waiting for Godot' than 'The Handmaid's Tale' I found this weirdly compelling. 3.5 stars as I would have liked a bit more material to work with.