At the beginning of the novel, for example, the child decides to count her heartbeats to determine how long the supposed “day” the guards enforce on them really is.

The child displays a need to question and oppose the norms that are prescribed to her, and her lack of ties to the old world mean that she is able to assess assumed truths with a critical eye, and occasionally able to reveal new truths to those around her.

For example, unlike the women, who find it barbarous and humiliating to use the toilet in plain view of the others, the child “found it perfectly natural…to go and sit on the toilet seat and carry on my conversation” on the basis of being unable to understand their anger, she deems them “stupid.” The child is also perplexed by the women’s insistence on arguing over how they will prepare the food they are given, despite the fact that “there was never any option but to boil the vegetables.” From her perspective, the women seem unnecessarily stuck in the past. As such, the attitudes of the women, who are fundamentally of the old world, and the child’s untainted ideas are pitted against each other, with the novel often taking the child’s side due to her position as the narrator. The protagonist of the novel, referred to by others only as “the child,” entered the bunker too young to remember the world before, but the women, who are much older than her, remember all but the events leading up to their entrapment. How should they live when there is no future? The novel presents a debate about what is best for this post-apocalyptic world, exploring a generational conflict regarding the relevancy of norms from the old world. The struggle for the group, however, becomes not survival, as the bunker they have left holds more than enough food and resources to sustain them, but rather purpose. When the group escapes the bunker, following a strange incident in which the guards disappear, the escapees find themselves in a barren wasteland. Jacqueline Harpman’s 1995 novel, I Who Have Never Known Men, published in English translation from the original French in 1997 by Ros Schwartz and out in a new reprint from Transit Books tomorrow, follows the life of an unnamed child who grows up in an underground bunker with thirty-nine women, who are all controlled and threatened by men serving as their guards.

I have never known men