I Who Have Never Known Men

About the book

Forty women live in an underground cage, guarded by silent men who never speak or touch them. The youngest prisoner has no memory of the world outside or the event that led to their incarceration. When a sudden siren sounds and the guards vanish, the women escape into a silent, barren landscape devoid of other human life. They wander across an endless plain, discovering identical bunkers filled with corpses and supplies. The narrator, disconnected from the social structures and sexual experiences of the older women, documents their gradual deaths and her own solitude as the last survivor of a species that has lost its history and its future.

Readers of specimen fiction and bleak existentialism value this book for its refusal to provide easy answers or traditional world-building. It attracts those interested in how human identity functions when stripped of culture, gender roles, and biological reproduction. The reader finishes the account with a stark view of loneliness and the limitations of memory. It serves as a study of how an individual maintains a sense of self in a vacuum where language and civilization have no purpose, leaving only the physical reality of a body in a vacant world.

Details

Published

1995

Language

EN