Purchasable
Purchasable
Purchasable
https://bookshop.org/p/books/i-who-have-never-known-men-jacqueline-harpman/0b1a839d8040a563?ean=9781945492600&bkshp-astro=t.https://bookshop.org/p/books/i-who-have-never-known-men-jacqueline-harpman/0b1a839d8040a563?ean=9781945492624&bkshp-astro=t.https://bookshop.org/p/books/i-who-have-never-known-men-jacqueline-harpman/0b1a839d8040a563?ean=9781945492600&bkshp-astro=t.Deep underground, forty women live imprisoned in a cage. Watched over by guards, the women have no memory of how they got there, no notion of time, and only a vague recollection of their lives before.
As the burn of electric light merges day into night and numberless years pass, a young girl—the fortieth prisoner—sits alone and outcast in the corner. Soon she will show herself to be the key to the others' escape and survival in the strange world that awaits them above ground.
Jacqueline Harpman was …
Deep underground, forty women live imprisoned in a cage. Watched over by guards, the women have no memory of how they got there, no notion of time, and only a vague recollection of their lives before.
As the burn of electric light merges day into night and numberless years pass, a young girl—the fortieth prisoner—sits alone and outcast in the corner. Soon she will show herself to be the key to the others' escape and survival in the strange world that awaits them above ground.
Jacqueline Harpman was born in Etterbeek, Belgium, in 1929, and fled to Casablanca with her family during WWII. Informed by her background as a psychoanalyst and her youth in exile, I Who Have Never Known Men is a haunting, heartbreaking post-apocalyptic novel of female friendship and intimacy, and the lengths people will go to maintain their humanity in the face of devastation. Back in print for the first time since 1997, Harpman’s modern classic is an important addition to the growing canon of feminist speculative literature.
Paperback, 184 pages
Published by Avon Books.
It’s been a long time since a book captivated me enough for me to read it all at once. It’s about finding meaning, in a way: what does it mean to be human, what does it mean to be a woman? The resonances with the war are unmistakeable, but this is more about what may have inspired its philosophical thread, not that it’s directly addressing those events.
This is not a pat story with a resolution or a moral.
I’ll re-read it, I’m sure.
