An Uncompromising Belgian Novelist’s Afterlife as a BookTok Star
Go to any brick-and-mortar bookstore and you’ll probably see at least one table dedicated to titles that “pop on BookTok.” Since around 2020, the literary precinct of the social-media platform TikTok seems to have usurped older marketing and publicity strategies as a primary driver of sales. The hashtag’s more than fifty-two million videos tend to feature telegenic young people emoting in front of brightly colored shelves; the recommendations flow into each other, a self-replenishing stream. Many of the books the platform uplifts belong to commercial genres, such as romance and romantasy. But BookTok has also surfaced classics, including doorstops such as “Lonesome Dove” and “East of Eden” and short, lesser-known works in an emotional and lovelorn key, such as “White Nights,” from 1848, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and “No Longer Human,” from 1948, by the Japanese novelist Osamu Dazai.
If there’s an overlooked treasure that BookTok most deserves credit for rediscovering, it might be “I Who Have Never Known Men,” a slender novel by the Belgian Jewish author Jacqueline Harpman, which first appeared in English in 1997. In 2022, the nonprofit publisher Transit Books reissued the novel in a revised translation, from the French, by Ros Schwartz. Largely thanks to social media, it has since sold more than eight hundred thousand copies in North America alone; Harpman, who died in 2012, has attained a posthumous internet celebrity, replete with honorary Google Doodle. This summer, Transit published a trio of her short stories, never before seen in English, under the title “We Were Forbidden.”
BookTok’s preferences may skew toward familiar beats and blunt-force sensation, but in Harpman the hive mind has alighted on something more capacious and slippery. “I Who Have Never Known Men” is a stubbornly unillusioned study of how isolation shapes and misshapes the human psyche. The book takes the form of a testimony that its nameless protagonist, the last survivor of an unknown catastrophe, is writing down as she dies of uterine cancer. Her earliest memories are of an underground bunker, patrolled by male guards with whips, where she was imprisoned with thirty-nine older women. She is innocent of parents, love, sex, what coffee tastes like, what an orange smells like, what the sky looks like.
Not quite halfway through the novel, the soldiers vanish, leaving a door unlocked, and the prisoners climb a hundred stairs to find a world of neutral plains and unremittingly mild weather. They never learn why they were jailed, what happened during their internment, or even whether they’re on Earth or some other planet. They wander, encountering groups of dead captives, male and female, in bunkers like their own, but no living people. They build houses with stones and mud, cook communal meals, and forage for food and supplies. And then, one by one, they die, leaving the protagonist alone.
Harpman’s picture of stripped-down desolation has resonated with many social-media users, who have praised the book’s “haunting” story and likened it to “staring into a void.” There’s an incongruity to the fact that an austere twentieth-century work of dystopian science fiction, which was admired when it was released for its philosophical rigor and inward focus, is finding new life on a social platform built out of clips that are disposable by design. But “I Who Have Never Known Men” has a fruitful vagueness. The narrator, purged of identifiers except for her yearning, her rational faculties, and her sense of unbelonging, is counterintuitively relatable—a portrait of rudimentary, universal humanity. (A whiff of melodrama to Harpman’s vision probably plays well online, too.)
It might also matter that “I Who Have Never Known Men” is preoccupied with many of the same questions that BookTokers, with their ephemeral medium and their new role as cultural conservators, have reason to care about. What are the creative forms that persist after you’ve disappeared? What enables an art work to transcend the stream? Harpman was writing in a different era, but the elegiac loneliness of her fiction anticipates our own solitary and screen-bound present. Is there anyone out there? her book seems to ask. How do I find you?
Harpman was born in Etterbeek, Belgium, in 1929. During the Nazi occupation, she and her family fled to Morocco, where they lived until the end of the war, escaping the fate of several relatives on her father’s side, who died in Auschwitz. Back in her home country, Harpman began studying medicine, but had to stop after she contracted tuberculosis. She convalesced in a sanatorium for two years—an experience that, like the nightmare still fresh in the memory of European Jews, may have filtered into her prison plot. Her first book, “Love and Acacia,” was published in 1958, when she was nearing thirty, but she composed the majority of her fourteen novels in her fifties, sixties, and seventies. In the interim, she trained in psychology, and in 1980 she qualified as a psychoanalyst. (Her undergraduate dissertation was on Rorschach tests.) Appreciated but not idolized in her lifetime, she won a handful of prizes, including the Prix Médicis for “Orlanda,” from 1996, about a woman whose tomboyish tendencies split off from the rest of her psyche and jump into the body of a music journalist.
Most of Harpman’s work that has so far been translated into English circles feelings of entrapment, disorientation, and exile. Psychoanalytic concepts—projection, attachment, wishes and wish fulfillment—loom large. Harpman portrays sexual fantasy, and its relation to writing, with startling frankness. Isolation becomes both an affliction and a muse in “I Who Have Never Known Men,” as the narrator spins out a sequence of erotic stories in her head. They star her youngest jailer, who, like his fellows, is forbidden to interact with his charges. (In a rare, sly note of comedy, she also stares at him incessantly, telling another woman that this is a form of resistance, and that she’s “invented something unexpected.”) Each fantasy, the girl says, produces “an extraordinary burst of light exploding inside me.” In pursuit of this “eruption,” she tells herself “increasingly long and complicated stories,” trying to outsmart her “inner audience” and retain the element of surprise. “My imagination developed,” she reports. “I had to exercise rigorous discipline.” Sometimes one part of her wants to get to the finale, but another part, “entranced by the pleasure of listening,” would prefer that the narrative keep going.
As the girl’s process evolves, the fictions themselves become at least as important as their physical effects, and a series of recurring characters turn into “old friends.” Her wistful hope is that a good enough story might yield companions so detailed and lively that they can satisfy her hunger for connection. She doesn’t realize how limited these friends are until she discovers books.
Poignantly, given that all the living men in the novel are incarcerators, the narrator directs little hostility toward traditional masculine ideals. In fact, her account often seems suffused with longing for heterosexual relationships—for the husbands and the lovers that she, unlike the elder women in the bunker, will never have. “How could I consider myself a human being, I who have only known thirty-nine people and all of them women?” she asks. By this point, she no longer experiences eruptions, but she’s still conjuring up men. When death comes for her, she writes, “I will take my last ten steps to go and put these sheets of paper on the table . . . an emaciated old woman whose eyes, which no hand will close, will always be looking toward the door.”
Yet is it really a man she’s waiting for, or some other type of partner? “Perhaps I have tried to create time” with the memoir project, the woman speculates. She is writing “for some unknown reader,” she continues, who will admit her work into their mind: “The reader and I thus mingled will constitute something living, that will not be me, because I will be dead, and will not be that person as they were before.” It’s an erotic fantasy that morphs into a metaphor of literary generation as sexual reproduction. Writing creates a life that will sustain the woman’s legacy—as long as someone is there to apprehend it. “Most likely no one will come,” she concludes.
As potent as Harpman’s novel is, there’s an adolescent quality to “I Who Have Never Known Men,” which broods on its themes like a teen-ager who has just discovered existentialism. The book’s post-apocalyptic setting ennobles its meditations on selfhood and finitude; the narrator’s search for perpetuity is lent an unshakable gravity by her circumstances.
For readers who first met Harpman via her melancholic digital afterlife, “We Were Forbidden” will arrive as a revelation. The gem of the collection is its longest story, “The Broom Closet,” a sex farce that wrangles its author’s ideas about artistic permanence into a more prosaic form. The tale begins with a successful novelist in late middle age boarding a train after a publishing event. When her gaze falls on a stranger in the dining car, she’s overtaken by a fantasy involving a dashing army officer in Central Europe in the nineteen-twenties. In the daydream, she is a young and beautiful judge’s wife in “long suede gloves that buttoned up to the elbows,” and the artilleryman seduces her at the magistrates’ ball. They have sex in the titular closet (“We toppled over together among the feather dusters”); she’s been so sheltered in her marriage that, somewhat implausibly, she has never seen a penis. But she’s a quick study, and is soon plotting her husband’s murder, enlisting the aid of an assassin whom he has recently sentenced to death.
Unlike the unremittingly bleak and occasionally self-serious “I Who Have Never Known Men,” “The Broom Closet” is arch, light-fingered, and very funny. But its narrator follows the same progression from fantasy to fiction-making. Her adultery story initially evokes the imprisoned girl’s compensatory reveries, but over time its focus shifts. She grows increasingly invested in her side characters, lavishing attention and energy on scenes that have little to do with the original seduction. In the most affecting subplot, the assassin the wife has hired to kill her husband appears at the husband’s bedside, unaware that he is already dying (the diagnosis is “acute appendicitis, with necrotic enterocolitis”). Nature takes its course while the would-be murderer watches. “Poor us, little souls wandering through the chaos of our lives,” the author cries, in a voice that might be the husband’s, or the hit man’s, or her own. She’s gone from dreaming up person-shaped sex toys to mourning a supporting cast member, extending her imaginative empathy so far that she can’t bring herself to allow one of her creations to be offed without ceremony.
The narrator of “The Broom Closet” can claim firsthand, intimate knowledge of men: she mentions a husband. But she doesn’t seem especially enamored of the guy, though she apparently lacks her alter ego’s taste for mariticide. What capacity she has for deep connection is expressed in her fiction. Like the child in “I Who Have Never Known Men,” she is preoccupied with her historical impact and pessimistic about the chance that her words will outlast her (albeit for reasons of literary fashion rather than planetary catastrophe). “I wanted to be loved, respected, and appreciated,” she writes, “but I will be forgotten.” She thinks that, if she’s lucky, a novel of hers “will be lying in the bookcase of one of my great-grandchildren, yellowing, dried up, likely to crumble to the touch . . . and my great-grandson’s new girlfriend will open it, read a few lines, and say: ‘Whoa! That style of writing is so outdated.’ Which will bury me once and for all.” Alienation may have acquired a kind of tragic glamour in Harpman’s best-known novel, but “The Broom Closet” renders it unremarkable, a function of quotidian human differences and difficulties rather than the end of the world.
At one point in “I Who Have Never Known Men,” the narrator stumbles upon an abandoned home and, as BookTok might put it, is “utterly ruined” by what she discovers: walls “covered in a beautiful wood with a dark sheen,” carpets, paintings, vases, “a small carving.” The museumlike “interplay of lines, shapes and harmonious colours” brings her to tears.
The scene enlarges the nature of the narrator’s quest: she’s not looking for just a romantic partner or even a reader who will preserve her memory. What she has been starving for, more than individual people, is what people create together. Her profound loneliness stems from her lack of access to human culture, a set of shared traditions that survives one’s particular life and links it to the past and the future. If Harpman’s work has jumped from her time into our own, it may be because she appreciates the fragility of this emergent property of existence but honors it anyway. Her books attest to the potential for solitary selves to meet, merge, and multiply, producing something more beautiful and enduring than they can alone. ♦