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!

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

    I remember once hearing the argument that the appeal of post-apocalyptic narratives is rooted in our desire to be unique. We are perpetually subjugated to forces beyond our control, making us feel insignificant and we have near endless access to the lives of others, making us feel like passive observers. In a world devoid of most other human life, we have the capacity to stand out.

    I’m not sure that argument really holds up for Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. The novel has essentially two main characters: the man and the boy. The man is a father, the boy his son. The two are traveling, trying to get to the ocean at the end of the road. The man’s wife appears in a flashback, as well, and it’s a pretty tragic arc in which she fears living in the apocalyptic and the man fails to convince her not to take her own life. The man struggles with a similar impulse but persists for the sake of his son.

    The apocalypse itself is tastefully unexplained. We just see the remnants: a dark and ashy world, seemingly without animals, where the man and boy hunt for canned food and boiled water to survive. The pair push around shopping carts and hide under tarps as they make slow progress down the road with just one bullet in their gun to defend themselves.

    The Road might be the most distinctly American post-apocalyptic narrative I’ve read. Throughout the book, I couldn’t help but feel a resonance with The Great Gatsby and its illustration of the American dream in decline. Early in the book, Fitzgerald describes the valley of ash: “where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air.” In The Road, everything has that same ashiness and the description of men moving dimly and crumbling through the powdery air feels like such an accurate reflection of the characters in McCarthy’s work. The Road also sees the characters find Coca-Cola and the man gives it to his son as a respite and a symbolic moment of the last dregs of American commercialism. Meanwhile, the pair hold a simplified notion of Good Guys and Bad Guys, continually reassuring themselves that they are the former and that they are pioneering highway heroes.

    To the young boy’s credit, he is exploring the nuances of the world much more thoroughly than his father. He’s of an age when moral absolutes become confusing instructions to follow, and seeing his development has a tenderness amidst the disaster. His father still tries to shield his innocence from the horrors of death, which ultimately proves impossible. In one of the more haunting scenes, the pair enter a bunker to discover a cannibalism ring, which is presented with enough detail to make it disturbing and enough subtlety to make it unnerving.

    In fact, most of the book reads as episodic. It wouldn’t be a far reach to reimagine this book as a television show. Sure, the novel progresses in the sense of there being a goal and they are literally walking towards it. On the other hand, though, it feels static, aimless, meandering—just as it would feel to experience the apocalypse.

    The episodic nature of the text is supplemented by a sparse and repetitive style. A student of mine read Blood Meridian and talked about how the sentences were so lengthy and lush. I found it such an interesting difference to The Road which has a number of simple sentences in succession. I opened to a random page and the first paragraph reads: “The falling snow curtained them about. There was no way to see anything at either side of the road. He was coughing again and the boy was shivering, the two of them side by side under the sheet of plastic, pushing the grocery cart through the window. Finally he stopped. The boy was shaking uncontrollably” (94). If I’m correct, there’s only one subordinate clause in the bunch. The unpunctuated dialogue between the characters is even more direct and repetitive. Here’s another random sample: “You don’t have to tell me, the man said. It’s all right. / I’m scared. / It’s all right. / No it’s not. / It’s just a dream. / I’m really scared. / I know” (189).

    This isn’t to say that McCarthy doesn’t have flourishes of lush style. Particularly with respect to the landscape, The Road includes some vivid imagery and surprising word choices. There were some passages early on that felt poetic and enigmatic, but I forgot to mark them, so I’ll include just two passages from towards the end of the book as representative. One passage starts as follows: “The days sloughed past uncounted and uncalendared” (273). Uncalendared! What a word! The passage continues as follows:

Along the interstate in the distance long lines of charred and rusting cars. The raw rims of the wheels sitting in a stiff gray sludge of melted rubber, in blackened rings of wire. The incinerate corpses shrunk to the size of a child and propped on the bare springs of the seats. Ten thousand dreams ensepulchred within their crozzled hearts. They went on. Treading the dead world under like rats on a wheel. The nights dead still and deader black. So cold. They talked hardly at all. He coughed all the time and the boy watched him spitting blood. Slumping along. Filthy, ragged, hopeless. He’d stop and lean on the cart and the boy would go on and then stop and look back and he would raise his weeping eyes and see him standing there in the road looking back at him from some unimaginable future, glowing in that waste like a tabernacle. (273)

Each one of those sentences, in my mind, has something distinctive about it. The “incinerate” corpses, having an odd echo of “interstate” from a few sentences earlier and distinctly not in adjectival form gives the sentences a strange disembodying quality. I’d never even heard of the word “crozzled.” The inversion of “they talked hardly,” which would be more natural as “they hardly talked” again stilts the flow of the sentences in an unnatural progression. The final line of the paragraph referencing the unimaginable future and the road “glowing in that waste like a tabernacle” again feels to me like an echo of Gatsby’s disillusionment in the green light.

The final passage of the book is largely unrelated to the “action” of the book and again provides some vivid imagery, this time in a more focused manner. McCarthy writes the following:

Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins whimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery. (287)

The symbolism of the final passage shines through with a world no longer possible. The fact that fish still existed and they offered maps and mazes—presumably that we didn’t follow, hence the apocalypse—points to the directionlessness of the future. Even the seeming happy-ish ending is really just an aimless prolonged excursion. 

    Overall, The Road was pretty good. I’m not sure it’s the masterpiece everyone makes it out to be, but McCarthy does a lot right as a stylist and an explorer of themes. The characters feel a little thin. The plot is arguably thinner. But, it still offers a particular voice and a story of connection and endurance against a cold and bitter world.

    Happy reading!

Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica

 

   It is not often that I allow the internet to persuade me to read things. Given that my reading is governed primarily by whim, it is often difficult for even my friends to convince me to pick up a book. And yet, there was so much hype online about Agustina Bazterrica’s Tender is the Flesh that when I found a water-damaged copy in a neighbourhood little library in early October, it seemed like fate to pick up this horror-ish novel for a spooky autumnal read.

    If you listen to the internet, the primary draw of the book is how grotesque it is. I’m hesitant to refer to it as outright horror, but the story does take place in a post-apocalyptic world in which animals have become inedible. Prior to the opening of the book, there’s a deadly virus that spread through animals, resulting in a pet genocide and a radical reimagining (sort of) of the meat industry. You guessed it: the new, “special meat” is people and factory-farmed cannibalism is the norm.

    I described Tender is the Flesh earlier as a “horror-ish” novel, but I think some elements of the structure take away from the horrific power of the text. Let’s talk first about focalization. The novel centres on Marcos, a downtrodden and apathetic employee at a processing plant for human meat. This allows Bazterrica to lay her world bare for readers, staging a plant tour for prospective new employees. The scene is certainly grotesque—it gets graphic on how people are killed, dismembered, packaged, and soon. The worst of all, I think, is the room of impregnated women whose arms and legs have been removed; they existed as bloated bellies with heads. The imagery is revolting, but it’s horrific in the same way that a safety training video at work is horrific. There’s no mystery or subtlety to drive the tension.

    Actually, the horror is less like a safety training video and more like undercover footage of factory farmed animals. The horror here isn’t speculative, just displaced. Everything that is done to humans in this book is already perpetuated against animals: being forcibly sterilized and inseminated, being pumped full of chemicals, being dismembered for the convenience of their captors, being stunned and murdered, and so on. I’m not sure how many instances there are of animals having their vocal chords torn out, but that’s another element of this novel. The descriptions of factory farms in Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer could be transplanted into Tender is the Flesh and, if it weren’t for the mentions of hooves and beaks, nobody would notice.

    If you’ve done some reading or thinking around the consumption of animals, you’re likely already familiar with the obfuscating effect of language when discussing the ethics of meat. For instance, the way we transform “cow” into “beef” or “baby cows” into “veal” or “pig” into “pork” or “bacon” or “ham” or any number of words that disguise what we’re actually doing. While I don’t have the capacity to discuss the linguistic nuances for the ethics of eating animals here, language is critical to Bazterrica’s work. 

    The first hint of Bazterrica’s interest in language is in the epigraph for the text. She includes an epigraph from Gilles Deleuze, which reads “What we see never lies in what we say.” The second half of the book begins with an epigraph from Samuel Beckett, who also (in my mind) is a writer obsessed with language and animality: “...like a caged beast born of caged beasts born of caged beasts born of caged beasts born in a cage and dead in a cage, born and then dead, born in a cage and then dead in a cage, in a word like a beast, in one of their words, like such a beast…”.

    There are clear references throughout the text about how language normalizes practices we would normally see as unethical. The fact that humans destined for consumption are called “heads” creates a separate class of existence for them, and nobody eats human meat: they eat “special meat.” Moreover, there are a number of references to Marcos’ perception of language. Bazterrica’s reflections are presented as both ethical and poetic, sometimes to an excessive degree. In the span of a few pages where Marcos eats with his sister, niece, and nephew, there are at least three references to how words feel: “Estebancito looks at him with a sparkle full of words like splintered trees and silent tornadoes” (99), “Her words get stuck inside her as though trapped in vacuum-packed plastic bags” (101), “His sister’s words are like dry leaves piled up in a corner, rotting” (103). The persistent metaphors are evocative, though I’m not sure if it quite gels with the obfuscating nature of language in the ethical discourse of the text.

    The conversation around language works, though, because it operates in conjunction with a critique of the visual language of our culture. For one, if the book is horrific, it is because that which we are regularly able to ignore when it is within the walls of a factory farm. Bazterrica presents the gruesome conditions with vivid detail. This is an overgeneralization, but the first half of the book seems to focus on establishing the language that hides horror and the second half explores more of the implications of visual representations. For example, the first chapter in part two begins when Marcos “turns on the TV, presses the mute button, and flips through the channels without paying attention” (123). I think it’s significant that Marcos turns off the sound—words are erased and replaced with image alone. Moreover, the images on the screen are themselves depictions of depictions. It’s footage of when “People had started vandalizing urban sculptures of animals. The program shows a group of individuals throwing paint, rubbish, and eggs at the Wall Street Bull. Then it cuts to other images, a crane raising the bronze sculpture that weighs more than three thousand kilograms, the bull moving through the air while people look on in horror, point at it, cover their mouths” (123). The Wall Street Bull is such an iconic image of an animal. Without getting into too much of the symbolism, I think it’s significant that a bull—an animal routinely toyed with and murdered before onlookers for sport—is the image here, particularly since Wall Street is a symbol of economic interest. The bull, supposedly an image of strength, is doubly reduced to a metaphor of consumption. The visual language takes over as people “look on in horror, point at it, [and most notably] cover their mouths.” The same passage then discusses the iconography of animals in art museums being destroyed, including paintings by Goya and Klee.

    Perhaps more critical is that a significant portion of the second part of the book takes place at a now decrepit zoo. The animals were all killed off long ago, but Marcos finds a family of puppies, with whom he finds affinity. Despite his own life being at risk when the pack finds him, he still goes to great lengths to ensure the dogs can survive after his escape. The zoo is symbolic of the way we use our power of perception to reduce others to the level of consumption. Zoos themselves are built for spectators, and Marcos notes the defaced signs at the zoo where images are paired with derogatory words about the animals.

    All this to say, I think that Batzerrica is putting forward an argument for animal rights and recognizing the twofold reduction of our animal counterparts via language and imagery. By substituting in humans for animals, Bazterrica points to the absurdity and cruelty of our extant system but there are a few details that complicate the matters.

    A key complication here—and one of the few that is not given a clear answer in Bazterrica’s straightforward world-building—is a layer of conspiracy. There are several references throughout the text that, perhaps, this resorting to cannibalism may not be necessary at all. Rumours that it’s a government plot to reduce overpopulation, to create a more consistent food supply, and so on, abound. There are suggestions that the virus infecting the animals is a sham. For instance, when it comes to the dogs in the zoo, Marcos goes to visit them and finds that a group of teenagers are torturing and murdering the puppies. When one of them gets bit, the boys in the group toy with the idea of killing him. It’s a tense moment where the boy has to convince them that the virus isn’t real and that he won’t get sick and die. Similarly, Marcos’ sister insists on providing him with an umbrella with the implication that all rain is beyond acidic—possibly parasitic? Marcos continually refuses the umbrella and yet experiences no ill-effects, possibly giving credence to the idea that there is misinformation about the health-effects the government has advertised.

    That’s an area that is potentially more controversial. I won’t touch Covid conspiracy theories with a ten foot pole, but it’s interesting that this novel, originally published in 2017, makes the connection between conspiracy theories, a mysterious virus, and the mass slaughter of animals who bear the blame for it. When it comes to the real world, politically, it’s a little dubious to suggest that this post-apocalypse is spurred on by fake news about meat consumption. But I’ll leave that be for now. There’s another conspiracy at the end that’s more straightforward to comment on: towards the end of the novel, the Scavengers that lurk outside the slaughterhouse, figure out how to tip a truck. They then murder the driver and eat him before laying claim to the “heads” he was transporting. The whole issue of the Scavengers is a little unclear: it’s like they’re zombies, but still humans—a third caste on the fringes. In response, the slaughterhouse decides it will give them poisoned meat to make them think people died from the stolen meat.

    There are other ethical issues that arise in such a context that exist at the more personal level. For instance, Bazterrica explores the implications of selling humans for meat consumption with respect to law and religion. Legally, measures have to be taken to prevent the mistreatment of “heads.” Being a blend somewhere between regulations for legal slave-owning and the bare minimum of animal protection laws, “heads” cannot be legally sexually assaulted and they are treated as literally branded property (branding = language + visual?). Protections need also to be put in place to establish a separate class—humans need to be protected from being eaten after their deaths, while “heads” are eaten regularly as “special meat,” sometimes even being raised in suburban homes and eaten piece by piece while being kept as a kind of pet. When Marcos is eating dinner with his sister’s family, she yells out that they don’t eat people—it’s a darkly laughable moment of cognitive dissonance.

    Another implication for the human meat market is that those in debt can subject themselves to a hunt. Taken up mostly by celebrities, there’s a scene where people pay to be part of the hunt or supervise it as entertainment for a famous rock star who descended into debt. The scene where Marocs and others feast on his body is described with some gross blunt descriptions of them eating him. 

    Meanwhile, people pay for extra protection to ensure their bodies are not stolen or dug up after their deaths—a protection regularly ignored and guaranteed only to receive extra payment for funerals. Religious characters in the novel, by contrast, will sometimes offer themselves as sacrifice. It becomes somewhat of a death cult, for whom Marcos has no patience. The meaning of an afterlife becomes more difficult to justify when we’re all “just meat.”

    Yet, Marcos retains some level of commitment to non-material idealism. Throughout the novel, Marcos cares for his senile father in a special old-age home, and when he passes he feels protective of his ashes. One might make the argument this is less sentimentalism than resentment for his sister, who never visited their father and who wants to hold a funeral for him. Instead, Marcos takes the ashes and dumps them at a place of special significance and replaces the ashes in the urn with random dirt and trash as a final act of rebellion against his sister.

    The novel, in my mind, is more about establishing the world than fleshing out (pardon the pun) the characters in full. There are some nice character details, but Marcos as the main character leaves me somewhat cold. Marcos is not attributed much emotion, and his lack of affect prevent my full immersion in the story. He has what has come to be a rather lacklustre, since overused, trope. He has a child that died young, which strained the marriage to the point of separation, and he has very little motivation other than grief and very little outlet other than sex. I did not feel particularly invested in his backstory, though it does come together reasonably well in the final chapters of the book.

    Before we get there, though, you’ll need some knowledge of the core subplot. Beyond the tours of the slaughterhouses, the central story is that Marcos receives a gift: essentially a “purebred” woman. Initially resisting the gift, Marcos ultimately ends up domesticating the woman, even giving her the name Jasmine. Initially, she lives in the barn, chained up and naked and provided with food and water. Over time, Marcos has her stay in bed with him, he starts clothing her, housetraining her, and so on. You may anticipate where this is headed. He impregnates her.

    This is a more ethically complex issue in the book that the Internet hasn’t really discussed in full. Jasmine becomes a pet, a domesticated animal. The implications for Marcos having sex with her are much more controversial, in some ways, the “heads” are animals. There’s reference to other people using “heads” as non-consenting prostitutes and paying extra to murder and eat them. If “heads” are the same as animals, this whole situation gets much more disgusting to think about, and your sympathy, I think, should lie with Jasmine. Meanwhile, Marcos goes on to hide her pregnancy, knowing that he himself would be sent to the slaughterhouse if others found out. 

    The ending, if somewhat rushed, does hold an impact. When there’s a problem with Jasmine’s pregnancy, Marcos calls his estranged wife, a nurse, in desperation. The moment of revelation is rife with tension. Her horror, though, is quickly overcome by the need to take part in the birthing process. It’s surprising just how quickly she reserves judgement, but as the scene progresses it becomes clear to you that your predictions are likely right. Marcos and his wife hold the baby as Jasmine reaches out for it. As they continue to ignore her, it becomes clear that their interests are not hers.

    The last dialogue in the text makes a dark moment darker and darker still. It becomes clear that Marcos is going to kill Jasmine—after all, how can he avoid being apprehended for this illicit birth? He shows her tenderness as she “wants to speak, to scream, but there are no sounds” (209). Marcos knocks her unconscious, preparing to murder her. His wife “jumps when she hears the thud and looks at him without understanding. ‘Why?’ she yells. ‘She could have given us more children’” (209). Cecilia’s objection is not a humanitarian one, but a self-interested one. It’s a dark turn that Cecilia envisions Jasmine’s continual exploitation. Marcos, though, who in just a few scenes previously stormed out of his father’s funeral when he accuses his sister of hypocrisy for having a ‘house-head’ in a makeshift fridge that they’re eating bit by bit, rejects his wife’s objection. When she demands to know why he’s going to kill their child-producer, though, Marcos’ response is chilling: “She had the human look of a domesticated animal” (209). The ending reinforces a class division between real humans and heads, but it intimates that the distinction has eroded. When recognizing the “human look” (again: perception), it’s too uncomfortable. The irony of a domesticated animal being more human than the real humans being exploited as “heads” is a wonderful web of inversions to conclude the novel. It’s an excellent final line to complicate the ‘argument’ of the text.

    The Internet can be hit-or-miss on its recommendations. People were, briefly, obsessed with this book. I can see the value of the book if you’re looking for a discussion of ethics and morality. There are a number of aspects of the book to “sink your teeth into,” as it were. As a literary work, I would say my review is ultimately mixed. The style of writing has some nice lines, but it often is a direct matter-of-fact tone. I wonder if part of the sometimes stilted language is part of the translation, but I’m not qualified to answer that question. The characters are somewhat drab or uninteresting. There are some compelling moments, which are when Marcos is most contradictory to himself. Cold and apathetic throughout, the moments of tenderness stand out as bizarre inconsistencies in his spirit.

    I’ll be curious to see the lasting impact of Tender is the Flesh. It’s an interesting book, but will it have the capacity to break through our collective cognitive dissonance to have an impact? Will it be seen as a literary classic? A classic in the realm of body horror? Time will tell, or if not time, then at least the Internet.

    Happy reading!