I Who Have Never Known Men

De: Jacqueline Harpman

Narrado por: Nikki Massoud

Deep underground, 39 women live imprisoned in a cage. Watched over by guards, the women have no memory of how they got there, no notion of time, and only a vague recollection of their lives before.

As the burn of electric light merges day into night and numberless years pass, a young girl—the 40th prisoner—sits alone and outcast in the corner. Soon she will show herself to be the key to the others’ escape and survival in the strange world that awaits them above ground.

Informed by her background as a psychoanalyst and her youth in exile, I Who Have Never Known Men is a haunting, heartbreaking post-apocalyptic novel of female friendship and intimacy, and the lengths people will go to maintain their humanity in the face of devastation. Back in print for the first time since 1997, Jacqueline Harpman’s modern classic is an important addition to the growing canon of feminist speculative literature.

This audio edition of I Who Have Never Known Men is expertly read by Nikki Massoud, a listener favorite. Produced and published by Echo Point Books & Media, an independent bookseller in Brattleboro, Vermont.

©1997, 2019 Ros Schwartz (P)2024 Echo Point Books & Media, LLC

WOW, a powerful performance and an incredible book

Nikki Massoud's narration of I Who Have Never Known Men is emotional, tender, engaging, and just really good. She makes it easy to listen to this frankly, at times, bleak and hopeless text. She imbues a lot of energy and ethos into her narration, she's very compelling and skilled. Really good separation between how she narrated different characters without ever going overboard or overly dramatic.

The book is incredible. It's simultaneously beautiful and tragic, bleak and hopeful, heart-wrenching and inspiring. The duality of these themes and feelings is communicated in such a fascinating and excellent performance of a complex, unique piece of fiction.

An allegory or an epitaph?

The writing is clean. It’s refreshing to find a writer these days who, for lack of a better term, writes well. The narrative is solid. But the book only provides questions, not answers. Clearly, this was the author’s intention. But for this reader, who values reason, the answers come only as they do to the narrator—in speculation and imagination.

The story has a meaning, without doubt. And that meaning is elucidated in the afterword, for those readers who might have otherwise missed it. But the meaning, itself, feels…false. Unanswered questions work well for philosophers and jury panels, but it’s difficult to embrace a story whose central conceit remains a mystery even unto the final words.

I enjoyed the book to a point. I would read more of this tale to deepen my knowledge of “the predicament,” but this tale felt more like an hors d’oeuvre, an interesting set piece, for its conclusion seemed simply to be, “In life there are often no conclusions.”

Does a good job with no answers

For me, 3 stars is everybody else's 5, so don't take this as "it was only ok."

Any author who can satisfy me while giving me virtually no answers, has accomplished an enormous feat. No answers in this book but that wasn't the point. Not a lot happens, yet I was rarely bored--also hard for an author to do.

Well written and quite sad

The ending is sad, but the book is still worth listening to for its beautiful prose and excellent performance by the author and narrator respectively.

Timeless

I find this book leaving me at a loss for words. Such a simple story that doesn’t try too hard to be what it’s not. It asks the question “what does it mean to be human?” in so many ways. Each question the narrator poses makes me want to turn inward to see where that same question has nagged at me in my own life.