I Who Have Never Known Men

by Jacqueline Harpman

Is there a satisfaction in the effort of remembering that provides its own nourishment, and is what one recollects less important than the act of remembering?

‘Something that everybody does becomes meaningless. It’s just a habit, a custom, nobody knows when it started, they just repeat it mechanically.

It is impossible to predict what might happen in a world where you don’t know the rules.

I felt a surge of grief, I, who had never known men, as I stood in front of this man who had wanted to overcome fear and despair to enter eternity upright and furious.

How much of our humanity is intrinsic? How much remains, when all else is stripped away?

Nothing is explained, but nothing needs to be. The beauty and power of the novel is in its ambiguities, in the hypotheticals allowed to flourish and demonstrate what they need to demonstrate. It should be unremittingly bleak, for all the ingredients for bleakness are there; and yet there is a shining, searching humanity at its core that carries it through.

‘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’,