If this is science fiction, it's my type of science fiction. Or speculative fiction, whatever you want to call it.

This is a marvellous example of dystopia, which raises big philosophical questions. The biggest to me is "what does it mean to be human". Indeed, especially when all is stripped away. Society, family, the whole world.

Let me back up a bit and explain the bare bones of this story. Forty women are in a cage monitored by male guards who never interact with them. The forty women don't know how they got in the cage. They don't know how or why. When, by a stroke of luck, they are able to escape the cage, they realize they also don't know where.

Forty women roaming an unfamiliar landscape, and the narrator of this story is the youngest of them, who has no memories except the cage-life. So who are you, what is your humanity, when your experience of community is prison, in and outside the cage? When there's so little outside of survival?

It sounds bleak and brutal, and it is, but in the same way as The Road is bleak and brutal. The Road, for me, wasn't hopeless. There was always love. There was always hope. And there is that in Harpman's pages as well, in her curious, frank narrator, and in the women she travels with. It asks many other questions, one of them for me is "what is freedom".

The author's family escaped Belgium when the Nazis invaded, and returned after the war. This biographical fact, once learned, can't help but inform the reading of this story. The senseless incarceration and death. The fleeing and survival, but - what was life like, after that?

The femininity of this book also can't be overlooked. The narrator who has never known a man, but who has had her world shaped by male captors.

I bought this book at a wonderful, eccentric shop that carries small-press selections, mostly in translation. I thought it was going to be fairly unknown, like others I purchased there. But I was amazed to see it's had an enormous number of readers. I'm gratified to know it. It deserves wide readership. We need to read books that make us ask questions, and turn the rusty wheels of our brains, especially in this time. Let's look bravely on what it means to be human, when all is stripped away. And what it means to be free.

40 women are imprisoned in a collective cage.

They don't know how or why they ended up there (where exactly is there?).

They are not allowed to touch each other, hurt themselves, cause a commotion, read, and so on.

Three guards take turns to watch over them without exchanging words.

One day, will they find freedom?

A girl, without a name and without her own memories of a previous life, is the one most responsible for guiding them in this strange world. Is it the same world? Are they in danger? Are they alone? What will they find?

A book driven by anguishing questions, with no one who can answer them. Millions of inquiries left for the reader about humanity, collectivity, time, writing... The list is long.

(Deeper discussions would lead me to spoilers, so I won't do them here.)

10/10

This is one of those books that you would never read without some reference.

The cover doesn't help, nor does the back cover. There is a front view of a lady who you imagine might be the author, and when you turn it over, there are two more photos... (I don't like so much the protagonist being the author, like Thomas Savage in "The Power of the Dog", etc).

The title also doesn't help. As you progress and almost until you finish it, you realize that the title should have been more explicit, more commercial. I think it wants to refer to what in our Spanish should have been translated as: "I who never knew a man", although it's a bit of a strange turn of phrase but it's clearer, right?

Aside from these small musings of a somewhat picky reader, I must admit that the novel that J. Harpman presents to us is quite good. It's a dystopian, apocalyptic world. I don't really know how to classify it. The protagonist has no name, the setting in which the plot develops is unknown, and there is a constant sense of unease and restlessness. There are some captive women, and we don't know the reason nor if there is a possibility of redemption for them.

As for what the novel is about, although I will hardly go into it to avoid an unwanted spoiler: a woman finding herself without a past and almost no future, discovering human nature, feminine nature, the meaning of life. It's recommendable.

2.5 stars


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