“I Who Have Never Known Men” by Jacqueline Harpman

Belgian author Jacqueline Harpman’s haunting novel “I Who Have Never Known Men” is an unsettling yet absorbing book that took me by surprise.

Some books you pick up expecting very little. You read the first page, settle in, and then, without quite knowing when it happened, you are completely hooked. That was my experience with I Who Have Never Known Men, a novel by Brussels-born author Jacqueline Harpman. The book has been quietly gathering readers for three decades, and is only now getting the wider attention it deserves. It is a strange book. Unsettling, slow-burning, but fascinating. And it is, in its own way, a very Belgian story.

Jacqueline Harpman: A brief portrait

Jacqueline Harpman was born in Etterbeek, Brussels, on 5 July 1929, into a Jewish family whose world was about to be turned upside down. When the Nazis invaded Belgium, her family fled to Casablanca, in Morocco, where they sat out the war in exile. They returned to Belgium after liberation, and Harpman threw herself into study. French literature first, then medicine.

That second path was cut short. She contracted tuberculosis and was forced to abandon her medical training. During her long convalescence, she began to write. It was a move that would define the rest of her life. Over the following decades she published more than fifteen novels, and eventually qualified as a psychoanalyst in 1980. This background seeps into almost everything she wrote.

Her fiction has a distinctive quality: psychologically precise, often unsettling, always alert to the hidden workings of identity and memory. She received a number of literary prizes during her lifetime, including the prestigious Prix Médicis for her novel Orlanda. She died in 2012.

Moi qui n’ai pas connu les hommes was first published in French in 1995. It was later translated into English as I Who Have Never Known Men, and became the first of her books to reach a significant Anglophone audience. However, it took social media, and a wave of online literary enthusiasm, to give it the readership it always deserved.

The strange world of I Who Have Never Known Men

The story begins in darkness. Forty women are imprisoned in a bare underground bunker, locked inside a cage, watched over by silent male guards who provide food and enforce rules but offer no explanations and almost no human contact. Most of the women remember fragments of their former lives – families, jobs, the world above – but none of them knows why they were taken, or by whom, or what has happened to the world outside.

Among them is a girl, our narrator. She was brought into the cage as a child and has no memories of anything else. No family to grieve. No former life to miss. And, crucially, no direct experience of men (hence the title). She exists in a kind of radical innocence: formed entirely by captivity, by the stories of older women, by observation rather than experience.

“I was forced to acknowledge too late, much too late, that I too had loved, that I was capable of suffering, and that I was human after all.”

Then, one day, something changes. A siren sounds. The guards vanish in apparent panic. A chain of chance events gives the women the opportunity to escape.

What they find outside is not what anyone expected. And from that point, the novel becomes something altogether harder to categorise.

My review

I’ll be honest: I didn’t expect this book to be as good as it is. The opening sections are somewhat slow. Harpman focuses on the cramped repetitions of life in a cage: the rituals, the silences, the careful management of time and space among forty women with nowhere else to go. For a while I wondered whether the pace would ever shift. But I guess the claustrophobia is the point. By the time the story opens up, you are already inside it. Completely.

Once the women escape, the novel changes register entirely. The world they enter is vast, silent, and deeply strange. I won’t say more than that. This is a book best read without knowing too much. But I can say that I never quite knew where Harpman was taking me. Every page raised new questions. Very few were answered.

The narrator is the novel’s greatest achievement. Having been raised entirely in captivity, she lacks the emotional reference points of the older women. She understands grief intellectually but cannot feel it the way they do. She pieces together what it means to be human from scraps: half-remembered stories, observed behaviour, the customs and values she has absorbed without ever having lived them. Watching her attempt to construct an inner life from almost nothing is fascinating.

“Survival is never more than putting off the moment of death.”

What begins as a survival story becomes, gradually, something more philosophical: a meditation on solitude, on identity, on what we lose when we lose memory, and on what remains when everything else is stripped away. It is not an easy book in the conventional sense. But it stayed  with me long after I finished it.

I recommend it to anyone who likes their fiction to ask difficult questions.

A Belgian voice worth discovering

Jacqueline Harpman is not well known in Belgium (or anywhere to be honest). She belongs to a tradition of Belgian literary fiction that is often overshadowed by the country’s more celebrated exports: the comic strip artists, the surrealist painters, the crime writers. But that’s just another reason to investigate her further.

If you have read If I Who Have Never Known Men, I would be interested in your opinion of it, either below in the comments or via email.

Denzil Walton

I created Discovering Belgium in 2011 to share the country’s hidden stories, fascinating places, and remarkable people. Through articles, photography, and audio walks, I share discoveries that reveal Belgium beyond the obvious. Hope you enjoy this site.