A review by jayisreading
I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman

dark mysterious reflective medium-paced

4.5

“The prose is cool water. Its images are lonely, weird, sometimes horrific, and always arresting.” I think Sophie Mackintosh rather aptly describes I Who Have Never Known Men in her afterword. (A kind of aside, but the afterword in this particular edition is definitely worth reading after reading the novel.) This novel was quiet, yet its message of humanness reverberated in ways I did not expect. Throughout the novel, Harpman asks what it means to be human (specifically a woman), especially after much of what makes a human human is stripped away. No context is given as to how or why a few dozen women were forced into cages at the start of the novel and what allowed them to escape, where they were after they escaped, along with the fact that there’s very little sense of time. To add to the disorienting ambiguity of it all, the unnamed female narrator has virtually no knowledge of what used to be, barely able to make sense of what the older women in the group tell her about life before confinement. Despite this sparsity of information, the novel is utterly rich in content as a result of the narrator’s curiosity about everything from the material to the abstract.

Something that struck me throughout this novel was Harpman’s observation of how humans can be the absolute worst toward other humans while simultaneously capable of showing so much love and care, the complexity of human nature. We see the horrors of how the women were treated at the start of the novel, but even during confinement and especially after escaping, we see such tender interactions between the women. These are all understood even to those who have not experienced conventional human life—in other words, the narrator—who herself notes at the start of the novel: “I too had loved, that I was capable of suffering and that I was human after all.” It was interesting to watch the narrator unpack newfound emotions and experiences, to continue to make sense of humanness, especially as Harpman whittled away dialogue, characters, and surroundings until the reader is left with a profound sense of loneliness in both prose and narrative, as well as a startling understanding of what it means to be human.

While I realize this novel is entirely speculative, I did find it a little hard to believe that the narrator was able to pick up on certain ideas and concepts as quickly as she did, but it wasn’t to the point that it completely took away from the reading experience. I also find myself a bit torn about the decision Harpman made to provide very little information to the reader. On the one hand, I thought it was incredibly effective in getting her ideas and message across; on the other hand, I did find it a little frustrating being left in total darkness from start to end with a lot of unanswered questions.

Overall, though, this was such a poignant novel that gave me so much to think about. I wish my French was better, because I would love to read this in the original language to really experience the novel’s emotional impact. I did think Schwartz handled the English translation phenomenally though.
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