“I Who Have Never Known Men” and “We Were Forbidden,” Reviewed

But “I Who Have Never Known Men” has a fruitful vagueness. 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. Harpman was writing in a different era, but the elegiac loneliness of her fiction anticipates our own solitary and screen-bound present. Most of Harpman’s work that has so far been translated into English circles feelings of entrapment, disorientation, and exile. 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.