I’m just here to appreciate ‘I Who Have Never Known Men’ by Jacqueline Harpman.

I’ve just had the privilege of my life to randomly order and read IWHNKM in the last two days, and my brain chemistry has changed. I’ve never read anything like this that is so profound yet simple to read. How does one even wrap their heads around out the strangeness of this world in question? It’s such a philosophical treat for the mind. As a woman, I have so much to think about. I wonder if this lifetime is enough to process all of that. I’m just maybe being a little bit dramatic too. Haha.

This is science fiction, defying rules of a science fiction with new world order. It’s forty women caged for twelve years, freed by mere luck and rediscovering life. Of them, the narrator is a pubescent, with no memory of any world besides the bunker she lives in with the others. Every other worldly feeling is a new one: the feeling of air caressing one’s skin, the concept of wet ground with a layer of stubble grass on it, one’s eye squinting as you dare to directly look at the sun, and whatever else makes one feel like they’re in a world full of needs, desires and greed.

There’s no extortion and false reading tropes laid out by the author – which is so wild to me because for the sake of my reading entertainment, something needs to be extorted. That’s the thumb rule, yea? Not here.

I’m so stirred by Jacqueline Harpman’s achievement, originally written in 1995, in French that 30 years later, chose to move me. This is exactly the genre that makes you forget to eat and sleep. It also leaves you speechless and gives you a philosophical treat to devour for the rest of your life.

There is no way I can possibly explain the extent of my feelings. Just writing this so any of you who wishes to read, does so and whoever has read it knows that there’s another admirer of this beauty in the world. <3

TLDR; just loving IWHNKM so anyone reading this gets all the motivation to experience this brilliance.