I Who Have Never Known Men

I really thought I was capable of writing one good review but I don't think we're there just yet. A slight spoiler alert though, I mostly enjoyed this book. Surprise surprise.

I Who Have Never Known Men is a slim book with an unnamed protagonist that's set in an unknown world. I was immediately captured by the premise of the book: 40 women kept in an underground bunker, not allowed to touch each other without hearing the sharp sound of the whip. And the protagonist is a teenage girl who hasn't reached puberty, and is seen unlikely to get there.

The protagonist only really starts to question everything when she finds out that women and men can have a relationship. Men are different to women and they both serve different purposes. She tries to learn what "sex" is but she is constantly refused any answers saying that she doesn't need to know any of this as she's no good in front of a man without a functioning uterus. Frustrated, she finds herself questioning everything. The most interesting part for me was her using her heartbeat as a measure of time and trying to figure out whether they live a 24-hour day as all the other people she is told about who live "normal lives".

Thousands of heartbeats later, the protagonist comes to the conclusion that there's no order to how long the guards' shift lasted and the women didn't seem to be served food at the same time everyday.

spoiler alert

All of this questioning gets interrupted as one of the guards is putting the key into the lock to open the door and a siren is heard. Soon after, all the guards have disappeared and the women find themselves escaping from this ordeal. They spend not days, not weeks, not months, but years, more than 30 years walking to find an answer to all of their burning questions, and maybe a standing civilisation. They find other bunkers like theirs, not always filled with women, sometimes filled with men but still in the same number. However, the state is always the same. They are all corpses that didn't manage to escape.

even bigger spoiler alert

30 or more years on the road, the women learn how to survive with the bare minimum and they start building themselves a village. Along the way, they lost most of their members either to old age or sickness.

Our protagonist is thought to be the last one to go as she's the youngest of them all. Coming to the cage as a child also means that she's the one with the least knowledge of anything related to a "normal life". She's never seen herself in a mirror, she doesn't know how a soap is used, and she still doesn't know what having sex entails. All of these things make her different from the rest, maybe also a bit more emotionless. To a level that she becomes the dedicated euthaniser of the group, stabbing right into the heart of those who wish to die.

When she's the very last human standing, she finds a strange space that resembles the most like a real home and she makes it her own home. Finally, she falls ill with a uterine cancer and decides to write about her life in the hope that someone might find the papers one day and read it.

spoilers over

"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."

Some of the lines in this book gave me goosebumps. Imagine opening your eyes to a world that you know nothing about, not even whether you are capable of having all the emotions other humans have. Constant loneliness. Even when there are other people around you. You haven't once lived a "normal life" like they did.

There are so many underlying themes in this book like hope, loneliness, frustration, and such. I initially felt very intrigued by the protagonist's journey in exploring what she hasn't experienced before from little things like learning how to count to experiencing loss of someone she knew.

Remember how I said this is a slim book initially? It didn't always feel that way. As readers, we don't get to know all the characters at full length which made me struggle forming a connection with them. This meant that their deaths were almost equally meaningless to me. So when it was pages and pages about their one by one deaths, I found myself in an endless misery.

Maybe I wasn't supposed to know anything about them. Maybe it was the better plot line that none of this came to a logical conclusion. But it left me feeling frustrated. Maybe the frustration was the ultimate goal of the author. Maybe.

The last sentence of the book was extra chilling:

"It is strange that I am dying from a diseased womb, I who have never had periods and who have never known men."

Just a book that pushes you to think a lot. I just wish I could form a connection with the rest of the women as well. And that there was some sort of a logical conclusion. I guess we don't always get the answers we want from life. Or from books.