Being an avid reader you would definitely agree that. Dystopian fiction is not always easy to carry off but when done well. It can soar and make a strong impact. Readers and reviewers also consider this book by Harpman as an excellent and imaginative novel. The book I Who Have Never Known Men has shades of Marlen Haushofer’s brilliant. “The Wall” and yet the book is utterly unique. The book is a wonderfully strange, surreal novel of entrapment, and survival set in a place. That may or may not exist on earth.
Knowing the Author I Who Have Never Known Men
I Who Have Never Known Men written by Jacqueline Harpman who was born in Etterbeek, Belgium, in the year 1929. She was half Jewish due to which her family moved to Casablanca. When the Nazis invaded and returned home after the war. Then after studying French literature, she started her training to be a doctor. But could not complete her medical studies when she came in contact with tuberculosis. This turn of events made her turn towards writing in the year 1954 and her first work published in the year 1958. Then in the year 1980. She was qualified as a psychoanalyst and resumed her career as a novelist only some twenty years later. Then onwards she wrote twelve novels and won several literary prizes most recently the Medicis for the present novel. Harpam also tied the knot with an architect and had two children.
Synopsis of I Who Have Never Known Men
I Who Have Never Known Men which originally published in French as Moi qui n’ai pas connu les hommes published in the year 1995 in the science fiction section of the novel by Jacqueline Harpman. This novel was the first ever novel of Harpman to translated into English. The book originally published by Seven Stories Press Under the title of Mistress of Silence in the year 1997. Then republished by Avon Eos. The most recent republication of the book done in the year 2022 by Transit Books. With the new afterward by Sophie Mackintosh.
The book I Who Have Never Known goes on with thirty-nine women and girls held prisoner in a cage underground. The guards are all male and never speak to them. The girls are the only prisoners who have no memory of the outside world. In fact, none of them know why they held prisoners or why there is one among thirty-nine adults. One day an alarm sounds and the guards flee, the prisoners are subsequently able to escape. Then they find themselves on an immense barren plain with no other people anywhere and no clue about what just happened. Overall, the book explores the themes of loneliness, sensory deprivation, as well as survival.
The Plot of I Who Have Never Known Men
The plot of this novel is intrinsically simple. Where a group of thirty-nine women of all ages lives are imprisoned in an underground cage outside. Which armed guards keep a constant eye on them. These women are completely clueless about the catastrophic event that led their lives to captured and have a vague recollection of the lives they led before their imprisonment. All these women’s memories are completely hazy, possibly as if they were drugged at the time. Over these women, a sense of apathy has settled as they see no possibility of ever being free or even a curiosity of why they got here. Being in constant surveillance with regular food but no privacy they forced to adapt to an undignified existence. Where they can’t touch each other, or display any kind of feeling or emotions of fear as the guard will whip them off.
Among all these women the youngest prisoner in this motley group is a young girl, also our unnamed narrator who referred to as a ‘child’ by the other women. The narrator is unique from all the existing women for she has never led a normal life to comparatively differentiate with like rest of the group. That is our narrator has known only a life in the cage, unlike others who have tasted the normal life, a life filled with freedom.
So the I Who Have Never Known Men opens with the narrator the only woman who has left alone in this perplexing, undecipherable world. It is the narrator who decides to write about and tell the story of her as well as women who are no more. And for the first time that she can remember she wracked by grief, a sentiment hitherto unknown to her. This recounting of serious moments, the chain of events that brought her to her final resting place. Hence forming the complete structure of the story.
Reception of I Who Have Never Known Men
When it comes to the reception of I Who Have Never Known Men then the book was a finalist for the 1995 Prix Fexima. In fact, in the New York Times, the book has been described as ‘bleak but fascinating’ and ‘about as heavyhearted as fiction can get’. The Kirkus Reviews compared it to “The Haindmaid’s Tale” and said it is “thin” but “moving” and “powerful” and the product of a “profoundly original imagination”. Overall, the republication of the book in the year 2022, added to the popularity of the book.
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