I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman

Perhaps one of the dead women I'd seen in the bunkers was my mother, and my father was lying mummified near the bars of one of the prisons; all the links between them and me have been severed. There's no continuity and the world I have come from is utterly foreign to me. I haven't heard its music, I haven't seen its painting, I haven't read its books, except for the handful I found in the refuge and of which I understood little. I know only the stony plain, wandering, and the gradual loss of hope. I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct. Perhaps, somewhere, humanity is flourishing under the stars, unaware that a daughter of its blood is ending her days in silene. There is nothing we can do about it.

Thirty-nine women are gathered in an underground bunker. They are watched over by three male guards, and their days are torture: the lights are kept on all the time; they are given meager food and made to cook it themselves; they are whipped if they touch each other. They can remember their lives before they were imprisoned, but they can't remember how they got there, and the taciturn guards give no clues. They are sure they will live and die like this, in hell. One, a fortieth, is not a woman, but a girl, one who seems to have gotten mixed up among the others. She alone is too young to remember the world outside, and because the guards do such a good job isolating them, she grows up sullen and aloof, unable to connect with the other women who are so much like her. She is stunted, not going through a full puberty--her body, we're told, intuiting that its energies are better sent elsewhere--but she is shrewd. She is only beginning to warm up to her elders when a siren interrupts a mid-day meal, and the guards scatter, leaving the door open, and the women make their way to the surface.

I imagine that for many people who read I Who Have Never Known Men, a kind of cult book that has recently received a renewed following, the first and most obvious touchstone is The Handmaid's Tale. What regime is this, where men imprison women without wanting anything from them, not labor or sex--and why not just kill them? But a better comparison is (I know, I'm always talking about this one) Marlen Haushofer's The Wall, a book about a woman who finds herself in impossible, isolating circumstances with no information about what's happening to her or why. Like in The Wall, there is no explanation forthcoming; all the narrator can do is try her best to survive. When they emerge from the bunker, none of the women are even sure this featureless landscape is Earth; one theory has been that they have been transported somewhere. They come across other bunkers where it seems the residents were not so lucky to have an open door when their captors fled; all have died. Some even appear to be groups of men, which kind of throws a wrench into the whole gendered oppression thing.

The rest of the novel takes place over years, as the narrator's compatriots become old, and then die, as they have always known would happen. In the bunker, the women pity the narrator because they know that ultimately she will be left alone; above ground, it happens just the same. No explanations, no revelations means no surprises. It's interesting, though, to watch the small society that grows up among the women, how they feed and arrange themselves, how they manage the difficult relationship with their past selves, and how the narrator grows up among them, receiving an understanding of another world only secondhand. She, of all people, is made for this strange new world, though she feels keenly the lack of understanding and memory that others have. The book is so strange that it's hard to say what is revealed in this strange experiment--a glimpse, perhaps, of how one manages to get by in the face of the narrowness of any given life. But few lessons emerge for the narrator, as for us--whatever happened here, the only possible response is to live through it.