One of the great things about books is that once they exist, they forever stand a chance of finding an audience, even many years after publication, even if they were not particularly notable at their first appearance.
“Moby-Dick” famously stiffed, sales-wise, in Herman Melville’s lifetime, but was resurrected 80 years later and now retains its status as an American classic. More recently, John Williams’ “Stoner” went from a modestly published novel in the 1960s to sudden sensation via a Dutch translation in 2013 that triggered a fresh publication of the novel in the U.S. in 2015, where it has now settled into status as a minor classic.
I am not a habitué of TikTok, but I do keep my eye on some of the older books that readers in the BookTok community resurface, and one that seemed to be a bit of an outlier caught my eye: “I Who Have Never Known Men” by Jacqueline Harpman.
Harpman was a Belgian writer and psychoanalyst who died in 2012. The American translation making the rounds on TikTok was published by Transit Books in 2022, and somehow has gone on to sell something like 800,000 copies, according to the publisher.
Journalist and novelist Emily Gould called it “The Handmaid’s Tale for Gen Z” which is both apt and reductive, capturing a portion of what likely ensorcells readers — a dystopian story rooted in a feminist point of view — but which also doesn’t quite nail what’s so compelling about the book.
The premise is strange and simple. Told by a literally unnamed narrator, 40 women are kept in an underground cage, overseen by a rotating series of men armed with whips for discipline, and provided the bare essentials in terms of clothing and food for sustenance. None of the women knew each other before being imprisoned together. Our narrator, who is telling the story entirely retrospectively, does not have a name because she was a child at the start of confinement with no memory of any life beyond the cage.
A sudden, unexplained incident sends the guards from the facility, and thanks to the narrator’s quick thinking, the women are able to free themselves, emerging above ground to a world that is Earth-like, but may not be Earth, with no apparent civilization in sight.
Sometimes I sense that an author has embedded a kind of guiding thesis for their work in the text, and with “I Who Have Never Known Men,” my radar perked up at one particular line: “It is impossible to predict what might happen in a world where you don’t know the rules.”
More Top Picks Best Hammer Drills
It struck me that this is the entirety of the narrator’s existence. All her compatriots knew an existence before imprisonment, but she only knows the cage and what she hears from the others, much of which makes little sense. The novel becomes the exploration of a psyche and personality forged in the absence of the kind of functioning society we readers take for granted.
While there is some forward story momentum, our retrospective narrator continually undercuts the notion that the goal is to discover why they were imprisoned or what kind of world this is.
Instead, we are privy to what it is like to construct a self out of meager materials, a life without touch or love or learning. The other women, with their desires and pasts, are a mystery to the narrator, who knows these things only secondhand.
Given this kind of life, at what would you persist? How would you know what you owe others?
Wondering at this world will keep readers entertained for the duration, and beyond the final page.
Book recommendations from the Biblioracle
John Warner tells you what to read based on the last five books you’ve read.
1. “Barchester Towers” by Anthony Trollope
2. “A Passage to India” by E.M. Forster
3. “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny” by Kiran Desai
4. “Flashlight” by Susan Choi
5. “Big Kiss, Bye-Bye” by Claire-Louise Bennett
— Carol F., Chicago
A mix of the classic and the contemporary, which leaves me some latitude. I’m feeling A.S. Byatt’s “Possession” is a good fit for this profile.
1. “The Enchanted April” by Elizabeth von Arnim
2. “Malice Aforethought” by Francis Iles
3. “Empire Falls” by Richard Russo
4. “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” by Tahir Shah
5. “Hot Water” by P.G. Wodehouse
— Carol B., Chicago
It’s Carol week! For this Carol, I’m recommending a 21st century book that tells an old-fashioned adventure story, “Carter Beats the Devil” by Glen David Gold.
1. “All the Colors of the Dark” by Chris Whitaker
2. “State of Terror” by Hillary Rodham Clinton and Louise Penny
3. “Shift” by Hugh Howey
4. “Anatomy of an Alibi” by Ashley Elston
5. “On a Quiet Street” by Seraphina Nova Glass
More Top Picks Best Premium Weighted Blankets
— JoAnn L., Oak Lawn
For JoAnn, my favorite, smart bit of suspense of the year, “The Fine Art of Lying” by Alexandra Andrews.
Get a reading from the Biblioracle
Send a list of the last five books you’ve read and your hometown to [email protected].
John Warner is the author of books including “More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI.” You can find him at biblioracle.com.