I read Jacqueline Harpman's "I Who Have Never Known Men," and...

…I think I’ll be sitting with this bleak, unnerving, yet occasionally hope-dappled novel for a long time, though I’m still wrestling with the implications of the title and the significance of gender in the book, but the inventive human anguish Harpman conveys with such spare, utilitarian prose is wildly impressive, and it becomes even more heartbreaking and layered when you consider the fact that Harpman was a Jewish psychoanalyst who, as a child, escaped Belgium when it was invaded by Nazis during World War II.