A friend of mine read I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman, translated from French to English by Roz Schwartz, posted a cryptic review, and so...I read it. I love when people find books that stick, that haunt, that make you go hmmmm, and then want to share that experience.
Without giving away too much, this book is about a group of women in a cage in a bunker underground, guarded by men. It's told by a girl who is the youngest, who was a child when the unnamed event happened, and has no memory of before the cage. She is super curious and wants to know EVERYTHING about life before and how things work. She has questions about sexuality, bodies, all kinds of things. Then one day, something happens and the women can leave the cage. What happens next is most of the book.
It is pretty grim, and definitely leaves you with more questions than answers. What would it be like to be in a community of only women under apocalyptic, disastrous, tragic circumstances? I flew through it in about 24 hours. I couldn't put it down.
I do have to say that the author was not pronatalist at all. Some of the women have had children, some haven't, some wanted to but it didn't happen. Motherhood isn't really a big part of the book, and the women are not centered as wives or mothers, except for some discussion about women who definitely had kids when everything happened, and have to believe for their own sanity that they are dead. Most of the book is about...what does it mean to be a human? To be alive? What is time?
When I was in Rhinebeck earlier this week, visiting my best friend, we went to an indie bookstore (always a bookstore), and I found the book. The store had 15 of them on the shelf! That's bonkers. It's esoteric, literary, translated, and currently put out by a nonprofit publisher, Transit Books, that is usually a print-on-demand publisher. Why was it so popular again?
It was originally published in 1995, and I feel like that is a time of lots of women-centered, dystopian, speculative novels came out (The Handmaid's Tale, The Parable of the Sower and The Parable of the Talents), and it definitely fits in. Well, maybe not definitely, I keep thinking about this book and it is not definitely anything. Very hard to classify. Apparently, this is a product of BookTok. I feel like usually BookTok is a lot of highly popular, prolific romance, romantasy, and mysteries (sort of a Court of Sexy Dragons and Housemaids by Colleen Hoover). I was happy to see that Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica had a popularity surge thanks to BookTok, too. (Hey wait, that one is ALSO translated! Fascinating! And WEIRD, like The Jungle if the cows were humans.) I am not actually on BookTok, or TikTok at all (or Instagram! GASP!). But I hear about it, because friends of mine are on it.
There were a few quotes that made me think, and ruminate, and I thought I'd share them with you.
"What are we, without a future, without children? The last links in a broken chain."
Okay, ouch. I think this is less a commentary on not having children and more a commentary on not having children as a society ever again. But that "last links in a broken chain" image stuck with me. I think all the time about how so many things end with me. A lot of them are perfectly fine (um, my knees, my autoimmune disorders, my anxiety/depression/ADHD, all that genetic soup of doom). But other things make me feel like the end of a chain.
"I think that time must have something to do with the duration of pregnancies, the growth of children, all those things that I haven't experienced. If someone spoke to me, there would be time, the beginning and end of what they said to me, the moment when I answered, their response. The briefest conversation creates time."
The first part of that stands out to me. Less the duration of pregnancies (I mean, 40 weeks is not a terribly long time in the scheme of things), but the growth of children. Time works differently for my friends with children than it does for me. I think one reason that it doesn't get mushy is because I live my life in school years, so there are milestones at different times each year. Otherwise, we have our birthdays, our anniversaries (which is why I celebrate so many of them), and milestones like PhDs and things like that, but there aren't things every year.
The second part is fascinating -- if you never talk to anyone, if you are alone in a cabin in the woods forever, would it seem like there was no time? Is time measured in conversations if there is no other way to tally it?
Lots to think about. Have you read it? Does it sound like something you'd want to read? I'd love to know what you think.
No comments:
Post a Comment