Reviews with content warning for Dementia - Yo que nunca supe de los hombres

Reviews tagging 'Dementia'

Yo que nunca supe de los hombres by Jacqueline Harpman

22 reviews

kimberleydawn's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional mysterious reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.75

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madelinequinne's review against another edition

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challenging reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

I’m not usually a fan of dystopian or sci fi books so this was a bit out of my comfort zone, but i thought the concept was really interesting!

when i picked this up i was more expecting it to be about a small group of women being held against their will by men for nefarious reasons, rather than it being a dystopia where so many people were in these bunkers for a reason nobody knew, so it was a surprise when i got into it and realised it was that, and i can’t say i hugely enjoyed it just cuz this genre isn’t really my kind of thing, but i did find a lot of the points the main character made very reflective and interesting, and found myself relating to her in some ways, despite her situation being so far from anyone on earth’s.

it was cool to challenge myself to explore a genre i’m not usually into, but i don’t know if i’d do it again

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kmac14's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional reflective sad fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

5.0

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nialiversuch's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional mysterious reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

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mal_eficent's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional hopeful mysterious reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

This is beautiful, and haunting, and fixes every issue I've ever had with end of the world dystopian narratives. There's no satisfying end, none of the questions are answered, and there's no bright moment of hope that fixes everything or offers anyone–characters or readers– a conclusion. It just ends as quietly as it begins.

If you want a dystopian story that's beautifully written without being pretentious, and isn't full of overt violence, then you have to pick this up.

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peggy_racham's review against another edition

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5.0

"I was forced to acknowledge too late, much too late, that I too had loved, that I was capable of suffering and that I was human after all."

I rarely read bleak dystopias but this one got me. Something about a woman wondering about her own humanity just speaks to me. There are no answers but it doesnt really matter in the end.

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loz1327's review against another edition

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adventurous emotional mysterious slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

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raybudbury's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional mysterious sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

Oh this one was bleak for sure

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not_another_ana's review against another edition

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challenging dark reflective fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A

2.25

2.25/5

And now, racked with sobs, I was forced to acknowledge too late, much too late, that I too had loved, that I was capable of suffering and that I was human after all.

In a cage underground forty women are kept captive. They are guarded and refused basic human rights, such as privacy and touch. None of them know why they're there, who's keeping them captive or for what. The youngest of them, our narrator, has never known anything but this. She has never known society, affection or even the open sky. Then, something suddenly changes and the characters are confronted with the world outside their jail.

This book is bleak. While there is some sort of plot this is more philosophical than anything. It's more of an exploration of the effects that this prolongued captivity can have on human beings. The protagonist is severely affected by this life of deprivation, she has no one to truly connect with. No peers, no parents, nothing different. She's also eventually going to be the only one left, due to her age, and thus is condemned to a life of loneliness.

I was intrigued during the first third or so, but after the big plot event it all became a bit too repetitive. Same with the mentioning of men and a world without them. I understood the trauma of it all but to me it focused too much on that specific loss and nothing else. Too many mentions of the protagonist never getting to have a husband or bearing a child that just rubbed me the wrong way. I didn't feel a sense of community within the women, it felt very sidelined. There's also, for me, the fact that the plot never gets resolved. No explanation of any kind, not even speculation, which was a bummer since that was the most interesting bit.

I did, however, quite enjoy the translator's note at the end. You can tell that Ros Schwartz was very passionate about the project and that the book resonated with her. Her reflections on the plot and Jacqueline Harpman's life were very poignant. I felt like I understood the book a bit more having read that and learning about Harpman's life during the holocaust, you can feel that experience in the writing.

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magicshop's review against another edition

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dark mysterious reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

And gradually, I began to feel sorry for those women determined to carry on living, pretending they were active and making decisions in the prison where they were locked up for ever, from which death was the only release – but would they remove the bodies?

i liked his book quite a bit. i thought the writing style was quite unique in the sense that it's told from a first person perspective. you rarely find books like that that are written as well as this one.

from the start, you spend time in this first person pov. you stay there the whole way through, and you slowly find out what's actually going on with the narrator. the tone of the text is that of a letter, or a message of some sort. she’s writing to a mystery recipient, and in my case i often wondered if she even knew who this recipient would be.

spoilers and full review below.

you slowly find out more about this narrator as the story goes on. what you do know right away is that she lives in a bunker with about 20 (or 40, i can’t recall) other women and that they are trapped in that bunker, which is constantly watched by several guards, all day and all night. they have been living in that nightmarish prison for most of the narrator’s young life.

one day they escape – not of their own choice, though they had been planning an escape attempt – but rather due to unforeseen and very mysterious circumstances.

i spent most of this novel wondering what was going on and hoping so much for every question to be answered. but the thing that i eventually realized is that the point of this particular story is not actually the story itself; it’s the characters. it's a character-driven story written like a sci fi mystery. i thought that was particularly well done because the author constantly tells you things about the plot that you get more and more curious about – you want to unveil its secrets and get all the answers, you want to figure out what's going on. but all the time, she's also telling you: hey, by the way, it's not about that. it's all about these women. it's about this particular woman, and how she lives her life and what she finds, and how she feels and what she thinks.

at some point in this story, i think you’re supposed to realize that you're never actually going to find out what’s going on. just like the narrator, you’re stuck in time. you are just one person and the child is just one woman, with her limited lifespan and limited resources and limited strength to carry on.

the child never found out why she had to lose every single person she ever knew and loved. she never found out why everything had to happen the way it did. it's really a metaphor for life itself. there's no grand narrative involved, there's no plan that we know of for how things happen, and why things happen. so i think in a sense by interweaving story and characters the way harpman did, sort of how things happen in real life, she's asking us to come to terms with everything being a human entails, the same way our main character had to do at the end of her life.

despite lacking so many elemental human experiences and not even having been given a name (who needs a name when you’re never going to meet anyone to introduce yourself to?), the child remains relatable and interesting to the reader (at least to me, of course). she seems almost naive at times, but other times she can sound extremely knowledgeable and wise. she was notably intelligent yet her tone often read as that of a child or teenager. i think this juxtaposition was very realistic for someone who lived a life like hers, who never had to grow up in some ways and was forced to grow up so fast in others.

i also find it very poignant that the child starts off living in a bunker and finds her demise inside another. the contrast and the similarities between her first bunker experience, where she had no privacy, no comforts, and only her own mind to keep herself entertained and sane – versus her experience in the bunker where she dies, where there's a lot of tangible entertainment, comfort in solitude, food in abundance, etc. she lives a long time in relative comfort then, but she’s just as restless and miserable as she'd always been – because she never was able to find what she was looking for even after all the time she spent searching.

the child was free to leave the last bunker at any time; she simply chose to stay there. there was nothing else for her to do in this life, and she knew that. she was buried even before death, just as she would’ve been if she’d been forced to stay in the first bunker, and neither did she have more answers than she did back then. that’s the tragedy of her life.

one last thing i want to say is how much i appreciate the way this book is so quietly and subtly queer. there are women in the group who are together and even live together in the houses that they build at one point in the story. at another point, before the houses, and while she was still young, the main character notices these pairs (she had only ever heard of straight relationships and had only had heterosexual urges at this stage) so she's like, what is this? and althea, one of her best friends and mentors, is like, oh, this is normal. this is just the way they take care of each other. and the child instantly accepts and sees this as normal as well, once she learns what it is. and i think that for a book published in 1995, that's kind of amazing and insanely valuable. it's not the main focus of the book by any means, but it is there and it is seen as very normal and very healthy, especially in a situation where most things these women go through are so depressing and gruesome – nevertheless they have each other, and it’s a much needed source of comfort and hope for some of them.

finally, i recommend this book to anyone, but please make sure you’re in a favorable state of mind to read about very bleak and possibly depressing topics before you tackle it. but really, anyone would benefit from reading this story. it's a very important reflection on the human race and how it survives despite all odds.

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