jacob’s Reviews > I Who Have Never Known Men > Status Update

"I ate gazing at my skeletons."

This novel is—and this is no complaint—near humorless. But, in plumbing the depths of existential absurdity, it does offer a few laughs. Like this line. Who ever dreamt of putting these words together? I can't imagine a writer doesn't chuckle to themselves in crafting a line like this; it's just so delightfully bizarre—even in its full context.

A+. New favorite sentence: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐.

". . . [W]e had understood that the guards didn't want to give us any clues as to the reasons for our captivity and our being kept alive, but we'd always assumed that they knew. What if they were as much in the dark as we were? What if they were forced to do a job that they weren't permitted to understand? . . ."

"Sitting on the bench, gazing towards the setting sun, she lost her mind in the cerebral convolutions . . . she had gone backwards, seeking a world that made sense, losing her way among the labyrinths, slowly deteriorating, dimming . . . fading away so gradually that it was impossible to pinpoint the transition . . . I let out a deep sigh. My last tie had been cut."

"One after the other, they were buried under that sky and neither they nor I knew if it was the one under which we'd been born."

". . . [W]e walked on until sunset, thirty-nine women and a corpse, a long, straggling column crossing the plain, a silent procession through the impossible, unwillingly taking possession of the void . . ."

". . . [W]e . . . lined up . . . forty live women staring at the forty dead women . . . So we hadn't been the only prisoners . . . [W]e found ourselves plunged even deeper into the absurd . . . [T]hey were our equals, our less fortunate doubles."

And one of the dead is our protagonist's individual double: the woman who died last, after watching—& hearing, & smelling, & being trapped with—all the others' deaths.

"These thoughts came to me with dazzling certainty . . . Where did they come from? . . . I only know that I derived enormous pleasure from what was going on in my mind."

So far I most enjoy the way Harpman probes questions around the pleasures, pains, and processes inherent to the act of thought.

'And we'll never be any the wiser. We will die, one by one, as age gets the better of us . . . You will be the last.'

. . . Since I had greatly exercised my imagination of late, I could guess her thoughts: one day, I would be alone . . . In the morning, a guard would pass me my food, which I'd cook on the hot plate, & I'd eat, sleep & die alone, without having understood our fate or why it had been inflicted on us."

"'Answer me with your own thoughts. If you have any.' . . .
'What's the use of talking about it? . . .'
'There you go again with your stupidity! As if talking only served to make things happen. Talking is existing . . .'
'But will talking teach us anything about what we are doing here? You have no more idea than I . . .'
'True, but . . .we'll feel as if we're behaving like human beings . . .'"