SO this is a book for Book Group, aka the book club I always assumed would be a fundamental part of my adult life along with “day to night” outfits (except this did happen). We got the recommendation actually from our Guest of Honor, Emma van Straaten (author of Creep, which we read last time), a solid win given the complications of finding a book that appeals to a group of 6-8-ish women and also hasn’t been read by more than one person. It is exactly what a book club book should be: short, intriguing, designed to be mildly divisive–or at least be divisive feeling enough that you can get some interesting dialogue going.
Last bit of context on the book: it’s a reprint, following a re-translation that was designed to make our main character less…unlikeable. Which is funny, because in a world without men why do female folk have to be likeable (or smile) at all?? It’s originally from 1995, so well past the Handmaid’s Tale and its long shadow of dystopian novels where women and women’s bodies are property-fied and sequestered. From Wikipedia:
Ros Schwartz revised her translation for the 2019 reissue by Vintage in the UK, which included an introduction by Sophie Mackintosh. This revamp was released in the U.S. by Transit in 2022. Available again in English after many years out of print, the novel experienced a surge in popularity, in part due to reviews on TikTok. In 2024, a reissue of the book sold 100,000 copies in the United States.
HOW FASCINATING.
We start off this book and very quickly think we understand where we’re going: 39 fully grown women and one girl are in a cage surrounded by male guards. The guards do not speak to them, touch them, or hurt them in any way, as long as they refrain from organizing, rabble rousing, hurting themselves, hurting each other, etc–they go about their monotonous day to day existence, cooking potatoes on hot plates and attempting to make new clothing out of old clothing that has fallen apart. The women remember the world before (Earth?) but cannot remember how they came to be in this cage, and none of them had any connection to one another before. There were attempts at rebellion (coups, hunger strikes, wheedling) that went nowhere and were subjugated, and so now they all just plod through life devoid of meaning.
Our one girl, however, is a bit of a mystery. The prevailing hypothesis is that she was swiped (as a baby) by accident, and then brought out of a lack of other options. With no memory of the before and unaware of all that she has lost, she comes up with creative new ways to rebel in her teenage years (lol)–for example, she learns to count her heartbeats to create a sort of rudimentary clock, giving the women a sense of control over their daily schedules.
All well and good–you’re waiting for the moment when it turns into a Handmaids Tale Breeding Factory or whatever–but the book is not that. An alarm goes off one day and all the guards flee, but one drops his ring of keys. The women use it to escape the cage, only to find…nothing. There are no guards. They’re not even certain they’re still on Earth. A cautious trek away from the bunker reveals some legitimately gasp-inducing reveals [namely another bunker, with another forty women, who perished in their cage from starvation…and then another, and then another, in a seemingly organized pattern but no additional explanation] but at the end of the day, we’re left with the question: who are women in the absence of men?
It’s funny that the only real way Harpman saw to wash a book of male influence required a desolate planet/desert with literally no culture or society whatsoever. But in reality, I think the more interesting question is the mirror: what is “being a woman” for our main character (nameless, of course), who has never known being a woman amongst men? Her actions and internal monologue throw into sharp relief what a female-identifying reader (like myself) associates with ‘being a woman,’ even if the reader believes themselves to be aware of and on guard to patriarchal notions of femininity.
As this is translated from the only other language I can read in (French), I do vaguely want to try it in the original…but we’ll see.