Translated by Irene Cecchi
What is the purpose of life when everything that defines us is taken away?
If we were to lose our memories, affections, habits, clothes and everything else that structures our daily existence, we would be left with very little to recognize ourselves with. Our sense of self is shaped by what we do, the words we say, the roads we walk each day and the memories of a lifetime.
Jacqueline Harpman, Belgian writer and psychoanalyst, explores the deep introspection of a woman stripped of everything in her novel I Who Have Never Known Men, first published in France in 1995 and brought to Italy by Blackie Edizioni in 2024.
Set in a dystopian reality, the story follows a group of 40 women imprisoned in a bunker, unaware of how they got there, stripped of their clothes and possessions, forced to live inside a cage guarded by silent sentinels who forbid them to touch one another and day and night are marked only by the switching on and off of the lights. Their memories are hazy, while the narrator —brought to the bunker at age 7— remembers nothing of her previous life and grows up there, memoryless and cut off from real-world experience.
Unable to bond with the adult women, she retreats into her mind and begins to fantasize. Only when one woman starts speaking to her, she begins to hope that things can change; she starts keeping track of time by counting her heartbeats.
Then, one day, a siren blares. The guards flee and the women finally manage to escape the bunker. Confused and afraid, they find no explanation for the sudden departure and discover a reality they don’t recognise: outside lies a vast, desolate, uninhabited land, offering no hope of returning to the life they once had.
Realizing they may be alone in this unfamiliar world, they set off in search of answers that may help them understand where they are and what happened. Along the way, they find other bunkers —inside, the bodies of other women, only in one there are men– who hadn’t managed to escape. They find no explanations, so they begin to take comfort in the bonds they form with each other.
The protagonist grows into a woman who has never known men, who has no memory of a real life and who builds her understanding of the world from the legacy passed down by the women around her.
What is femininity when you’ve never encountered the opposite sex? What defines you when you're not immersed in a society?
In the novel, these questions largely remain unanswered. All we know is that the narrator, now old and the last survivor, has found books and paper in an abandoned bunker and is finally telling her story.
I Who Have Never Known Men is thus a novel with deep psychoanalytic intent, clearly tied to Harpman’s background. It lies somewhere between dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction and fits within the realm of feminist science fiction, where writers like Margaret Atwood, author of The Handmaid’s Tale, have left a lasting legacy.
Though it did not achieve widespread success upon its original release, in recent years the book has found a new audience through BookTok, selling over 100,000 copies in the U.S. in 2024. In Harpman’s dystopia, social media might have had no place but in our world, they have given her unexpected success.
Mondo Internazionale APS - Riproduzione Riservata ®2025
Fonti:
https://www.succedeoggi.it/2022/06/caso-jacqueline-harpman/
https://www.labalenabianca.com/2025/04/28/io-che-non-ho-conosciuto-gli-uomini-harpman/
https://www.rivistastudio.com/io-che-non-ho-mai-conosciuto-gli-uomini-bestseller-tiktok-trend/
https://culturificio.org/io-che-non-ho-conosciuto-gli-uomini-di-jacqueline-harpman/
https://universoletterario.it/io-che-non-ho-conosciuto-gli-uomini-di-jacqueline-harpman/
Link immagine: https://unsplash.com/it/foto/p...
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Alessia Camisa
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