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I Who Have Never Known Men
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"I Who Have Never Known Men" Discuss Everything *Spoilers*
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I loved this. I'm curious if the lack of answers, which didn't bother me because that lack was part of the point, bothered people. It's been years since I've read The Stranger, but this book very much reminded me of that.
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Melani wrote: "I loved this. I'm curious if the lack of answers, which didn't bother me because that lack was part of the point, bothered people. It's been years since I've read The Stranger, but this book very m..."I began to view the questions that went unanswered as immaterial to the ideas Harpman most wanted to communicate with this book. Like the “why” and “how” was not even really important, and those critical events just served as plot devices to bring us the real story.
I loved this book. Gave it 5 stars/ favorite shelf. I loved the ideas it brought up (memory, identity, loneliness vs. community, etc...). For maybe the first half I was preoccupied with my own questions: where are they? why did this happen? is there anyone else alive? Then, for the second half, I got immersed in the story and the questions it seemed the author was suggesting we ask.
My review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Hank wrote: "I also loved this and the lack of answers are why I liked it. It made me think, which was part of the point, of what existance means. If you are alone in the whole world do you keep living just for..."For me this was exactly the heart of the book! I live alone and have for many years, so I wasn't sure if others would come up with that same question or if it was because of my circumstances that I dwelled on that part.
I’m so confused and conflicted about this story. I absolutely get what everyone says about no answers being the point of the book, but in my case it just added to the overwhelming feeling of despair and futility of existence. Because if we forget for a moment that this is a work of fiction and put ourselves in her world, the things she wrote about in the end, ‘if no one reads it, no one will ever remember me, it’s as if I never existed’ is what actually happens. And for me personally it’s devastating. What is the point of dwelling upon all those questions of life, love, loneliness and identity if in the end what’s left is a planet full of nameless corpses that nobody will ever remember?
Olga wrote: "What is the point of dwelling upon all those questions of life, love, loneliness and identity if in the end what’s left is a planet full of nameless corpses that nobody will ever remember?"This is everyone's fate though, eventually. Nothing is forever. The sun will die, and Earth along with it. Eventually the universe will end, or expand to a size beyond light & heat being able to reach anything, leaving a big empty frozen nothingness, or maybe it will be something else, but we won't survive whatever it is. Isn't THAT a depressing thought?
It really makes me examine how I spend my life and what gives it meaning while I am here to live it.
I read this about a year ago, and I found it really moving. Something about the way the story is told and and the narrator's unique perspective made what could have been a sad, bleak story something more to me.I found the narrator's delight in learning, even learning things that couldn't possibly be useful to her later, to be refreshing. Because she is experiencing her new world as it comes and not in reference to the loss of a past world, she is able to find beauty, to see things for the first time, to have joy. I felt sad that she wasn't able to experience as much of the joy and comfort in others due to her circumstances, but she still had love and friendship with some of the other women.
At the end, when she is alone and feeling like her life was so much of the same routine, I understood that feeling. Even in a world with so much more than the one that narrator lives in, often my day-to-day life is monotonous - go to work, deal with meals, take care of the house, take care of my son, sleep. Her desire to live on by writing down her story was so beautiful - I loved this part toward the end:
"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, because my story, added to their mind, will then become part of their thinking."
I like to think that each person who reads the book is like the reader she referenced, changed because now her story and our stories will have blended.
When I read the title, I thought of the saying, "A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle." I was expecting a society without men that was, in some ways at least, an improvement over what we have known in our lives and through history. However, in this book, women living without men have no hope because their society has no future.I probably would have appreciated (though perhaps not enjoyed) this book more if I had read it as part of a philosophy course. Like Thus Spoke Zarathustra, thought-provoking philosophy is not always good storytelling. I don't need a happy ending; I often find tragedy to be beautiful. This book, however, failed to engage me. Things followed too neatly from the premise, without twists and turns. The Child and Anthea are the only major characters. Much of the story is told in summary, and the details we do see are often repetitious and mundane.
I disagree with the idea that people would be so spoiled by the past or so fixated on the future that they can't adjust to a new reality. Human beings are remarkably resilient. People can find pleasure in what they do, even if no one is around to benefit or approve. Not everything has to be utilitarian. People do a lot out of intrinsic motivation.
Chris wrote: "I disagree with the idea that people would be so spoiled by the past or so fixated on the future that they can't adjust to a new reality. Human beings are remarkably resilient. People can find pleasure in what they do, even if no one is around to benefit or approve. Not everything has to be utilitarian. People do a lot out of intrinsic motivation."Really? I think we are seeing this very thing playing out all around us. Though, I suppose that's more a matter of "won't" than "can't".
And granted, you are probably talking about a much more dire, survivalist situation, and I would agree that survival would depend on finding something worth surviving for.
We don't really know any of the other women's thoughts or feelings or motivations. We don't know what they endured before the narrative begins. We don't know what situation brought them to where they are, or what ended it. We only have the narrator's very limited, very unreliable perspective memory to tell us about what she saw - and if I remember correctly, she doesn't understand the people she shared that existence with any more than she understands anything else. She is observant, but can only provide context to a limited degree by what she is able to learn from the books she picks up much later. For her, I think her quest for understanding is what gives her that purpose.
I'm curious what you mean by intrinsic motivation. To me, in this context, this means food, water, shelter. Basic human functions. I think that once the threat of violence from the men was removed, an attempt at bonding and forming a community - but those women who had been captive for longer probably had it well ingrained to obey and not break the rules, and that would be hard training to break.
Was there something else that you'd expect?
Becky wrote: "I'm curious what you mean by intrinsic motivation."Intrinsic motivation is when one does something out of the thing's positive inherent qualities, not for some external reward like money. Painting for the love of the experience is intrinsic motivation. Painting in the hope of becoming recognized by history as a great artist is extrinsic motivation.
When the women formed sexual relationships, Anthea explained it as making the best of the circumstances. Maybe that was a reference to sexual preference, but I think it was bemoaning the fact that procreation was impossible without men. I say that sex and relationships are rewarding and fulfilling in themselves, even if babies aren't possible.
The Child's book is another example. Instead of enjoying the act of writing for its own sake, she had to hope that some future audience will read it.
Gotcha. I was thinking more instinctual than that. I don't remember a lot of the details of this book. It's been 3 years and a couple hundredish books since I read that one. But, yeah, what you say does make sense in terms of self-fulfillment and meaning, outside of desire for posterity that may not exist.
While reading this book, I was most focused on these questions: - Is an utterly solitary life worth living?
- Is a life without hope really possible? If it is, is it worth living?
Chris and Becky's exchange immediately above, made me think of this book more in terms of living for the moment. The narrator in this book doesn't seem to do this- she is constantly looking for hope, looking for a future, doing things- not for their own sake- but in the hopes that someday they will matter.
I loved the book as written, but I can't help but be curious how the story might have been different if the author had been more focused on her in-the-moment experiences rather than her hopes for the future.
Diane wrote: "Hank wrote: "I also loved this and the lack of answers are why I liked it. It made me think, which was part of the point, of what existance means. If you are alone in the whole world do you keep li..."I share a physical space with someone, but I typically go several days without speaking to anyone, and I can't remember the last time I had physical contact with another person.
I frequently question the significance of my continued existence. Is it enough to find comfort or pleasure in small things, but share it with no one? Is my unwillingness to look beyond today helpful or harmful to my mental health? It prompted me to ask myself a lot of very personal questions, honestly. I haven't worked out all the answers, but the Child's humanity has helped me see some of my own worth.
That's the thing about aloneness- it leaves so much time for self- doubt on one hand, and reflection, on the other. Being alone, it can be easy to forget that we matter- we don't have people reminding us that we do, whether by words or by actions. Its great when books can nudge us into reminding ourselves of our worth.
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I also think about people who've been traumatized repeatedly and how eventually the brain does sort of just go away, just turns off all things related to joy and motivation because the same chemicals that make those are also part of the things that hurt and eventually the nervous system says enough is enough. In that way, I get it.
There was an afterword by a scholar and she talked about how this book does a lot regarding gender. But it's subtle because the only comparison is that they're not imprisoned any more. There's no society collapse we have heard of, no concept that the prisons were made by men or that only men were guards in all the prisons and so on. So all we can see is what women who remembered men made of their society in the face of a foreign land and the certainty that you cannot watch your civilization continue through any family line, so whatever you do now is only good for as long as you live.
What do you build if you're 90% sure that you're the last of humanity? For these women, it was a decently happy life with as little conflict or stress as could be managed. And part of me finds that beautiful and honest.
Another part of me though wanted so much more. Like some of you have said, I wanted an answer! I wanted at least a different mystery, some sort of view into the interior minds and hearts of these people. I found it unbelievable that a kid thought of counting her heartbeats to measure time without any prompting and had all those insights out of her isolation. I was hoping for at least a joy in home-making beyond utility.
So I'm of two minds! But I do appreciate that it made me think and feel anything--especially in something so literary, those are sort of the marks I require to base whether I feel the book "succeeded" and I think overall it did.
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That is beautiful and I love that books and art in general can help reflect ourselves back at us. I do think you have value, and I hope you continue to find joy and meaning in your days!
The lack of answers gives me a lot of mixed feelings. On one hand, I love theorizing about open ended questions that arise, and this book really has a lot of them. But on the other, what is the point when there is never any way to tell if my theories are correct or not? But I suppose that's the entire point of the novel. Throughout the book, I found myself wondering about certain details, but then telling myself "it doesn't matter. I'll never get an answer to it." And in that way, I guess it connected me with the characters.
Just read this, pretty much in one sitting. My nose was stuck to the screen until I finished it.I think the book has a defiant hopefulness in the midst of all of the absurd horror of the cabins and the 40-person cages. The loss of hope and pointlessness of their condition is balanced by the child's constant striving and hope, even in the face of abject loneliness. Because I don't think she was every lonely; she was simply alone, as she had always been.
I thought this was an incredible book. I don't feel that it needs to be dissected to know, why this, and where that, and who them. Sometimes the point is that you can never know all of the reasons, you just have to accept the conditions for what they are. And the conditions that the child and her group encountered were simply mind-shattering. That they survived at all is a testament to their luck and courage and perseverance.
I think this is the book that made my year. I definitely need to re-read it.
I loved this book and was okay with the lack of answers. I think it takes masterful writing to not explain everything in a way that allows us to shape our own ideas of what may have happened but also guide us all in the same understanding. I can’t imagine how hard it was to live/grow up in this existence as the Child does, always as an outsider who never knew any differently. It may have made her more resilient and resourceful.
I recommend this book, although I don’t think it’s for everyone because of the lack of answers. 5/5 for me.
Chris wrote: "I disagree with the idea that people would be so spoiled by the past or so fixated on the future that they can't adjust to a new reality. Human beings are remarkably resilient. People can find pleasure in what they do, even if no one is around to benefit or approve. Not everything has to be utilitarian. People do a lot out of intrinsic motivation."In the end, I was lukewarm to this book.
I have to agree with Chris's assessment of this book. People more often get on with their lives, even after living in horrifying conditions. That the women kept pining for an old life for decades didn't ring true to me about human nature. I found the exploration of how a truncated society would impact the philosophy and societal structure compelling. I just don't believe that most of the women would experience malaise and despair as the predominant emotions.
I did find the writing to be excellent and the book hard to put down. But I also needed more answers. When I read scifi, I want an exploration of scientific ideas, rather than only an exploration of human nature, although, I do think this book would be excellent in a literature, gender, or philosophy course.
This felt outdated with how nowadays many women choose to live without men and children and with how womanhood seemed to be closely tied to reproductive organs. I mean, the protagonist has to have cervical cancer (I assume) to finally feel like a woman and therefore human.
I thought of some books where the character/s is completely alone, the only person on Earth, due to Apocalypse or because everyone else left for a colony planet. That would be lonely, but at least you would understand. "I am a sentinel" or "I somehow survived that Plague" or something. Or, if a handful of people are left, a possibility that some day in the future there could be a new community.But here the women didn't know, and after years "the Child" was alone and still didn't know. Bleak.
@Netanella my reaction was very similar to yours. This book lodged itself into my psyche and there, I think, it will stay. I *do* think the child was lonely, though. Just not in the debilitating, sometimes deadly way some of the other women were. I think she was always looking over the next hill, past the next rise, hoping to find someone who might understand her. All the other women had some memories of the before times, which made the child feel left out. she had no true peers - no one who had come of age with her, who was limited to the same frame of reference she had. I think there's loneliness in that. and even at the end of her life, she *still* imagined someone finding her writing, hearing her voice, and validating her existence.
1. What did you think of the world?
2. What did you think of the characters?
3. What worked or didn't for you?
4. Overall thoughts?
First Impressions thread