I Who Have Never Known Men

by Jacqueline Harpman

Translated by Ros Schwartz

Here we are at page fifteen and I have no idea what I am reading. Without the guide rails of genre I have not the slightest inkling where things might go. I cannot even estimate when this book was written–the fact that it is a translated novel means it could be a rework, or newly licensed, or just released.

The book is opaque. I like that. I like knowing absolutely nothing, and trying to get through it. 

Now that the book is done and my in situ thoughts have been written, I can go back and check on things. As an old man, 1995 feels modern to me, of course, but it was thirty years ago. Still, I Who Have Never Known Men feels modern. Even after I uncovered the superstructure of genre, I liked the mystery inherent to how the pages might be filled. Everything is interesting, even when it appears banal, if you’re looking at it from the position of “Why is this a book?” or “How did this physical artifact happen?” or “Why is this event on the page happening?” or “Who thought this would be interesting to read?” I Who Have Never Known Men is interesting throughout, though, so I didn’t need to dip into my bag of metatexual tricks to clear the ancillary bits; the words on the page were enough to motivate. Even once I acknowledged it was probably science fiction, I still did not even remotely know where it was going to take me:

…Anthea lay on her back gazing up at the sky as we walked, still wondering if it was that of planet Earth. There was a moon. The women always said that it looked like the moon they’d known, but they weren’t sure they could trust their own memories.

In big and bold words right now, I suggest you go read this book before you go any further on this review, or any other. Going in blind is a benefit. Honestly, having an unnoticed afterward was a big benefit for me, because I had believed I had pages left to go when the ending crept in. But not knowing the plot is important, I think, to a book one could summarize it in a few words. Teasing out events over a hundred pages is crucial to infecting the reader’s mind with loneliness, futility; the blessing of appreciation for a life ensconced in humanity comes at the cost of confronting perfect nihilism.

I used to be afraid of fire when I was a kid: fire that would burn down my house, take away all the objects I thought were important to living a meaningful life (SEGA Genesis; my hats; probably homework?). I occasionally confront that same irrational fear now, but it is the Earth, not my home, over which I fret. This is not an anthropocene climate change statement–that is quite rational–but fear for the inevitable swallowing of Earth by the Sun when the Sun runs out of hydrogen. This is a projected event five…billion years away. But inevitable, it seems. What does humanity do by then?

Perhaps we’ll escape our doomed globe. But there seems to be a limit to what society will accomplish before it torches itself. Never Known touches this cosmic isolation:

Another time, I collected lots of branches and made a fire that could be seen from a long way off. I kept it going all night, although my common sense told me that there was no one. But it also told me that there are so many bunkers and that probably, most probably, there was another one where the siren had gone off when the door was open, and why should they all be dead?

We can look and look and look, but the universe is just too big to find anyone else, even if they’re probably somewhere. But oh no, look at me, giving away parts of the story. I did warn you, did I not? The narrator is here, wandering a barren world. First with others, then alone. Is the big empty field the vacuum of space? Are the bunkers planets? Is she an intergalactic traveller, or a synecdoche for our species, or simply a woman freed from all material conditions, bored and unraveling on the wind of true freedom?

Perhaps, somewhere, humanity is flourishing under the stars, unaware that a daughter of its blood is ending her days in silence. There is nothing we can do about it.

The book is too interesting to subsume with simple metaphor, but I cannot escape the belief that, while it felt like a glimpse of divine revelation each time the narrator mentioned that it might not be Earth that they are wandering, the whole mess is a direct parable for our species. In our current reality, let us say that, sure, we escape our prison planet through NASA or Space Force of astro-privitization–what then? We might wander the stars, finding countless other rocks that either held life at one time or have been dust and vacuum since the beginning. The afterward has a line that calls I Who Have Never ‘a minute account of a nightmare,’ and that is sort of what all existence is when you think about it too deeply. Even if we leave this planet, where would we go? It’s just empty space out there, any maybe some deserted bunkers.

I am not saddened by this book, but in it I hear the clearest question of what meaning there is to life for us a individual people or as a species. Crisp and cool and startlingly terrifying, the images in this book have implanted themselves fairly deeply into my head. As with all novels, time will fog the clarity of detail. But I am certain the essence of the book–or at least what I have posited the essence to be–will remain. “There was a moon. The women always said that it looked like the moon they’d known, but they weren’t sure they could trust their own memories.” If you cannot remember the moon and will never be allowed a way to compare, then just pick one: yes, that is our moon; no, that is not our moon. Perhaps things will change tomorrow by whim, by revelation, or by discovery. Or perhaps not. 

When one doesn’t know where one stands, in reality or in genre, it is best to just keep moving. I Who Have Never Known Men is the clearest account of unclarity imaginable, which makes it one of the best stories about the opacity of life that exists.