Belated bestseller: Why the TikTok hype surrounding this novel is justified | EUROtoday

The incomprehensible occurs twice: as soon as when 39 girls and a lady immediately get up in an underground jail guarded by guards. They do not know why they’re right here. And as soon as when the 39 girls and the lady immediately discovered themselves free once more after an alarm. They do not know what to do along with her.

Both successive situations in Jacqueline Harpman’s novel I Who Didn’t Know Men brim with Kafkaesque absurdity. The proven fact that the Kaspar Hauser story presents itself as a diary-like report of the lady taking inventory shortly earlier than her demise additionally brings it near Marlen Haushofer’s novel “The Wall”, from which Harpman on no account has to cover.

What’s not on this little guide: The Belgian writer with Jewish roots, who fled to Casablanca along with her household in 1940, makes use of her weird dystopia to mirror, on the one hand, the experiences of the focus camps, the sudden onset of a brand new regime and its sudden finish.

On the opposite hand, it is usually in regards to the timeless query in regards to the which means of life, which has no reply besides that it’s curiosity and hope that preserve us going. Why can we be taught to learn and rely and write although we all know that sooner or later we will certainly die? Because we won’t assist however hope that issues might end up in another way. And as a result of the which means lies in studying, arithmetic and writing.

“I, Who Didn’t Know Men” is as a lot an interesting research of asexuality (the first-person narrator is aware of no males and has by no means been in a position to develop sexual inclinations) as it’s the world’s most miserable anti-loneliness drug. It is a homage to the traditional instructional ultimate in addition to its simultaneous resigned swan tune.

It is a stunning ode to fantasy and creativeness in addition to a hopelessly hopeful account of the survivors – ought to there be every other than the narrator someplace on the market on this world that she would not even know whether or not it’s Earth or one thing else fully. The great factor about Harpman’s masterpiece is that it defies any overly clear interpretation. Just if you suppose you have got understood that it’s about violence perpetrated by males towards girls, the heroine finds a cellar during which solely male corpses lie.

Lack of explanations

I Who Didn’t Know Men is a horrible guide and it is a fantastic guide, however most of all it is an existential guide. As barren because the panorama, during which no animals dwell and nothing however desert and mountains of corpses unfold out in entrance of the heroine, Harpman’s language is simply as barren and concentrated. Nothing is superfluous right here, not a potato is wasted, not a phrase is alleged in useless, not a step is taken an excessive amount of.

The lack of explanations for her state of affairs with which the narrator has to return to phrases, in addition to the shortage of human feeling with which she is endowed because of rising up within the underground cellar with out daylight or contact, appear radical and at occasions macabre, however forestall any tendency in the direction of kitsch. What makes us human? This query can also be posed by the impenetrable parable, whose reception historical past is not less than as astonishing as its content material:

The novel by the writer, who was born in 1929, was first revealed in French in 1995 and was initially solely poorly acquired. The translations into English and German did not make any waves for a very long time both. Until TikTok found him – and made him well-known. The Cut journal’s headline: “‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ for Gen Z: How BookTok turned a ’90s dystopian novel into an indie bestseller.” Now the novel is showing in German for the second time in a sublime translation by Luca Homburg. The belated success of I Who Didn’t Know Men might be the perfect factor TikTok has ever performed.

Jacqueline Harpman: I, who did not know males. Translated from French by Luca Homburg. Klett-Cotta, 224 pages, 24 euros.