I HAVE WHO HAVE NEVER KNOWN MEN by Jacqueline Harpman

Translated by Ros Schwartz

With The Handmaid’s Tale becoming a depressing reality, those who once revelled in its speculative horrors must now look further afield for their fix. Enter Belgian writer Jacqueline Harpman who, in 1995, gifted us with something so grim, so other-worldly that it’s easy to see why it was a bit much for its time. What it really needed was a global cluster@&%$ of monumental proportions to seem not only relevant, but urgent. Well, here we are!

The book opens with forty women in a cage, likely in some kind of warehouse bunker. They know nothing of the outside world, other than some “event” that saw them herded together and stripped of any stimulation. Narrated by the youngest, we follow their routines; the boredom, the despair, the hope. And then one day the guards disappear, the cage opens and they enter the world. Except it’s a desolate wasteland. With other bunkers full of the bodies of those whose cages didn’t open when the guards fled. Over time the women build a society, learn to be human, rediscover their sexualities, die. It’s a bit Atwood, a bit McCarthy, and a bit Hoban. Heck, screw the comparisons. It’s totally original and singularly brilliant.

I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman (Tr. Ros Schwartz)
Vintage, 2019
188 pages