I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman

           It isn’t every day that I read a book based on the BookTok hype, but I found myself intrigued by Jacqueline Harpman’s I Who Have Never Known Men. The hype is a little strange, given that the book was originally published thirty years ago. I suppose the renewed traction is the result of its new 2022 translation by Sophie Macintosh. It also turned out to be part of a pattern in my reading for 2025—novels about women in isolated situations.

I Who Have Never Known Men is a post-apocalyptic novel that offers more questions than answers. The novel’s protagonist is the youngest girl in a group of women who’ve been imprisoned in an underground bunker, continually surveilled by men with whips. The women were previously unknown to each other, don’t know how they got there, don’t know why they’re being monitored. It’s a world shrouded in mystery—and it might not even be our world; it’s heavily implied that they’re on a different planet entirely, which is a fun twist.

Our protagonist knows nothing of how the world was before and so is doubly othered. Like the other women, she can’t explain why things are the way they are. Unlike other women, she has no point of comparison. The conspiratorial nature of the book is presented early on and its ambiguity is one of the highlights of the text. In conversation with other women, the narrator is told, “No one has the slightest idea what’s behind all this. There isn’t the slightest clue. They rounded up the adults—you’re almost certainly here by accident. At first—well, not really at first, because there’s a period that remains hazy in everybody’s minds—but after that, from the time when our memories became clearer, we know we used to think all the time” (25). The mystery goes on: the men could have killed all the women or taken them away elsewhere, but the men don’t kill them. The interlocutor says, “your arrival would have brought news, and the one thing we are certain of is that they don’t want us to know anything. We came to the conclusion that they left you here because any decision can be analysed, and that their lack of decision indicated the only thing they wanted us to know, which is that we must know nothing” (25). There’s a perversity in the captors’ logic. Their calculated ambiguity disrupts all comprehension.

There’s a kind of relationship between knowledge and desire that emerges in the early chapters of the book. Following the conversation above, the protagonist notes that she “experienced a mild light-headedness which was rather pleasant. It reminded me vaguely of the eruption and I promised myself I’d see if I could work it into one of my stories” (25). She notes how “never had any of the women spoken to [her] at such length” and she “sensed that she’d passed on to me everything she knew” (25). There’s a kind of titillation in knowing things, in having secrets revealed. When she refers to “the eruption,” she alludes to a kind of early adolescent fantasy about one of the guards, a figure of knowledge-power (how Foucault!). That fantasy itself, also rendered ambiguous, is pretty twisted. It’s somewhere around Stockholm Syndrome but without the language to even describe her experience.

When the protagonist senses the importance of secrets, she dabbles in formulating her own. In her experiments, she reflects:

Andrea, who was the brightest of the women, immediately grasped that it wasn’t the actual content of the secret that mattered, but the fact that while living under the continual scrutiny of other women, it was possible to claim to have a secret and be believed. This seemed too complicated for the women to understand and they dismissed Anthea with a gesture of annoyance, demanding that the secret be prised from me. (18)

What I appreciate about Harpman’s approach is that she sets up early that the structure of the secret is what matters, not the content. The rest of the book breeds that paranoiac thinking. The key plot points in the book are secrets. Partway through the novel, the women all escape the bunker. With no explanation, the men are gone, the doors are open, and the women are free to go. They then wander what may or may not be Earth, unsure of whether they’ll ever find another refuge. The group does eventually find equally inexplicable bunkers: bunkers where the women have all died without being released, but then there are also bunkers of men, so the potential explanations fall apart. Later, the protagonist comes across a bus of deceased guards wearing gas masks and things—again, with no explanation offered. The secret prevails.

I forgot to mark off the passage, but there’s even a part about how questions keep her going. After questions, there are new questions, and those questions give us purpose. It’s interesting how Harpman brings together the idea of secrecy, desire, power, and purpose.

The other element that was most compelling to me philosophically was the idea of time. The narrator essentially invents time from scratch. She starts to measure her heartbeat, counting the regular rhythm of its beats. She then extrapolates to count minutes and hours. I have to say, it’s pretty unbelievable to think she would actually be able to keep track of time while doing other things. If I suspend my disbelief entirely, what I think is more interesting is that the earliest experiences the narrator tells us about are related to desire, secrecy, and then time, the lattermost being the one that starts to give meaning to experiences. Time is converted into a weapon—if she can measure time, she can plot against the guards. I find that a really engaging way of thinking through the fundamentals of being human.

Admittedly, it’s been several months since I actually read this book and I’m trying to catch up on my reviews now, but I did find there were several moving sequences. The book spans decades. As the women get older, the central character takes on the role of euthanizing them. Rather than succumbing to illness or disease, the main character stabs them through the heart, not having particular hang-ups about suicide (for example). It’s heartbreaking to watch as the women die one after the other. The relationships are ambiguously romantic and it’s painful to see the narrator lose the woman closest to her and to be left alone forever.

Overall, I’d say I quite enjoyed the book. Given how much the characters focus on what happened, I would have expected there to be answers, but that’s not how the world works. There’s a heartfulness to the book, even if the narrator sometimes comes across as cold. The plot is mysterious and its ambiguity is compelling. It’s a philosophic meditation that is as frustrating as it is moving. A lot of people really hyped this up as being a perfect book; I’m not sure that’s quite true, but I did like it. It’s worth the read.

Happy reading!