On 'We Were Forbidden'

When the Belgian-born author Jacqueline Harpman died in 2012, her slim, bleak novel I Who Have Never Known Men, first published in 1995, had fallen into obscurity. Her vision did not quite jive with ’90s optimism: the novel opens with thirty-nine women and one child caged in an underground bunker, where they are guarded by men with whips who refuse to look at or speak to them. The prisoners are unaware of how they arrived there, why they are being held, or if they will ever be released. In a stroke of luck involving a triggered alarm and a warden’s lost set of keys, they escape into a desolate landscape that may or may not be Earth, only to discover that they are the only survivors of the human race. Even the guards have died.