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Book: Jacqueline Harpman: I Who Have Never Known Men

This post contains spoilers.

The fiction section of my local library has a lot of hefty doorstoppers. For my own stupid reasons, I wanted something that I could finish in just a few days, to fill a gap in my reading schedule. While scanning the shelves, I saw this slim volume, recognized the title from message board discussions, and decided to give it a shot.

Forty women are imprisoned in an underground bunker. They are watched constantly by male guards, who patrol the outer perimeter of the group cage. The guards never speak or acknowledge the presence of the women, except to menace them with highly precise lashes of their whips. The prisoners, who don't remember how they got there or why they're being held, endure a miserable existence deprived of any meaning or dignity.

One day, the guards are abruptly summoned away, and by sheer luck, an abandoned keyring is graspable from within the cage. The women are able to escape to the surface, where they find themselves the only inhabitants of a vast plain.

The protagonist is the youngest of the group. She is alienated from the others by her lack of memories of life before imprisonment, and also by her body's failure to complete puberty. In her old age, long after having outlived the others, and suffering from a terminal illness, she writes her life story with the hope that it may one day be found and read by other humans.

This is a bleak, thoughtful novel. No light is ever shed on the absurd situation, and the protagonist can only speculate and observe while trying to make the best of things. The storytelling is efficient and the ending, I think, lands perfectly. I have read a few novels this year that deal with characters stranded in end-of-the-world scenarios, scavenging for canned food and whatnot, and while they were all pretty good, this particular book has stuck most in my mind.