Forty women are in a cage. They neither know how they got there or why. What fills their time is repetitive gossip, braiding hair, and confusion so tangible it seems to seep out of the cage’s bars like fog. But one day, when an alarm blares and the male guards run off, the women are able to escape. For once, they are free. The jubilee is short-lived, however, when the women are welcomed to a desolate landscape marked by nothing but rolling hills. How free are they, really?
The women walk for years. As they keep venturing through the hills, their hope follows the shape of the terrain. Their hope rises, and their hope falls. They reach another peak, praying for people, a town, anything, only to be met with an empty valley. The promise of any sign of life besides themselves dwindles over the years, and they are forced to rely on each other more and more. They build houses, create routines, and fall in love as they attempt to make sense of this existence.
Jacqueline Harpman’s book I Who Have Never Known Men is haunting. The writing, though frank and sparse, feels like an inescapable void. Fall in, and you face the weight of questioning what exactly it means to be human. What is humanity when you strip it away to the bare necessities? The protagonist meditates on this question often.
My favorite quote in the book, by far, sums up the protagonist’s revelation: “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.” I love this quote because I believe it sums up the human experience perfectly. The novel’s strange, empty world takes almost everything from the characters, but their humanity is unshakable. It gives beauty even to their suffering because it means they are alive. In the book, existence is power.
But I think the biggest and most daunting question presented in the novel is: Why are we here? This question is so deeply embedded in all of us and strongly connects the reader to the book’s absurd world. I will warn you that if you read this, prepare to be frustrated. I turned every page with the battered hope of finding the answers to the same questions the women had. I’d be lying if I said the fog was completely cleared by the end of the book. Yet, I think that is what makes the book so good. We don’t get any questions answered, but I’ve come to accept that this is an answer in and of itself. This makes the story much more relatable.
We’re not so different from these 40 women. We’re each navigating our own barren, rolling hills, asking “Why?” with the hopes of finding a satisfactory answer that makes getting out of bed worthwhile. And like the characters, sometimes it feels like we’ll never find it. Maybe we never will, but we keep walking on, hope replenished at every peak.
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