Many of the criticisms I see of this book have to do with “nothing happens.” And honestly, in a way I agree! If you’re the type of reader who is looking for action and a climax and a resolution, this really might not be the book for you, and that’s totally fine. But I also don’t think it’s entirely fair to say that nothing happens.
This book was strangely both disquieting and oddly comforting for me. The premise is pretty straightforward, I guess: a group of women are kept in a cage guarded by men. The older women in the group remember life before the cage, but the narrator, who was either born in the cage or was a very young child upon arrival, has no such memories. Eventually, the women break free of their captivity and emerge out into a desolate, empty world, where they appear to be the only survivors.
There is no explanation given for why the world is how it is, or how the women ended up in the cage. Many of the questions a reader might naturally ask about the setting are never answered. And to me, it felt like that might have been the point, a little bit. The novel seemed to me to be an exploration of what it means to take control of your own life, even if that’s desolate and frightening to do, because the alternative is so much worse.
For me personally, it did help to contextualize the contents of this novel to know that Jacqueline Harpman’s father was a Dutch-born Jew, and that she and her family fled to Casablanca during World War II; they didn’t return until after the war ended, and much of her paternal family died in Auschwitz. I think knowing that made the bleakness of the novel make so much more sense — this idea that it’s better to take hold of your own destiny no matter how desolate it might be than to remain at someone else’s mercy even if it’s comfortable to do so.
This is definitely a quiet novel and does not contain much by way of action. It’s extremely introspective about human nature, in particular women, and how women might act under circumstances like these. It left me feeling sort of unsettled but not entirely in a negative way, and is absolutely a book I’ll be thinking about for a long time to come.