A review by chichio
I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman

dark reflective tense slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.0

I told myself that I’d been hypocritical and, since I had no one to lie to, I discovered that you can lie to yourself, which felt very strange. Was I missing companionship more than I thought and making myself into another, a witness, if only to deceive her?

Hm. Genuinely don’t know how I feel about this because, on the one hand, the writing on a line level is so beautiful and the character work done for the narrator-protagonist is so thorough (despite her not having a history for us to latch onto). We literally sit back and watch the narrator develop a personality which was interesting to read. Still, this “bleak” read oftentimes felt boring, repetitive and uninspired. What sucks about me saying that is that I quite literally understand that that’s the point. Can I acknowledge that all while saying that I didn’t love the book? Yeah. 

I did, however, enjoy how this book explores personhood and what components work together to make someone a person, to make someone human. I enjoyed how the book asked and vaguely answered the question of what makes someone who they are. Is it our culture? Is it our memories? Our thoughts? Our secrets? Is it our passions—creative and/or sexual? Is it who we choose to enter into companionship with? Or, do we only exist when someone is around to see us doing so? 

Perhaps I have tried to create time through writing these pages. I begin, I fill them with words, I pile them up, and I still don’t exist because nobody is reading them. I am writing them for some unknown reader who will probably never come–I am not even sure that humanity has survived that mysterious event that governed my life. But if that person comes, they will read them and I will have a time in their mind. They will have my thoughts in them. The reader and I thus mingled will constitute something living, that will not be me, because I will be dead, and will not be that person as they were before reading, because my story, added to their mind, will then become part of their thinking.