I went into I Who Have Never Known Men not knowing much other than it’s dystopian and about a bunch of women trapped in a bunker. I think that’s the best way to approach the novel. Anything more would stray into spoiler territory, because with this book, the less you know beforehand the better.
I really enjoyed the first part where the 40 women are stuck in the bunker. It’s the most deeply introspective part of the book, where we explore the mind and coping mechanisms of the only child in the bunker—the only one who doesn’t remember life outside of their underground prison. She is excluded from the other older women, and in her exclusion, she immerses herself in her own imagination, in counting time using her own heartbeats, in quietly taunting a guard using the only subversive method she’s allowed, and eventually, in learning, taught by the only older woman she really learns to care for.
Her childhood escapism into imagination is one I think a lot of introverts can relate to, and I enjoyed her growth from anger born of ignorance to tolerance born of understanding and companionship. Our nameless protagonist experiences the most growth in these pages, which I suppose makes sense as these are her formative years; she leaves the bunker around 15 years of age, though neither she or the readers know her actual age.
The rest of the novel spans over 40 years, I believe. I still enjoyed the book, and I particularly thought the parts about her delivering euthanasia-esque mercy killings as her companions succumbed to sickness without medication thought-provoking, but as a whole, it wasn’t as strong as the first part of the book for me. I somehow felt that though she had left a more confined world and was now freer, she had less to say. The protagonist also sometimes alternated between antisocial misunderstanding of human sympathy to displays of generous considerateness, so either she didn’t fall into an extreme or she was inconsistently portrayed.
The novel as a whole was very well-written. I was just expecting more from it. We get absolutely no answers. We don’t know where she is, why the women were imprisoned, who imprisoned them, or what happened to the rest of the world. And I don’t object to that choice. In fact, I respect it. But based on the level of hype, I was expecting something groundbreaking, and the book hasn’t proved memorable for me.
