Reading the 30-Year-Old Belgian Novel That Went Viral on TikTok
September 24, 2025
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It’s not very often that contemporary French-language books make a big splash in the American market. You’re more likely to find the heavy-hitters at your local bookstore: Camus, Hugo, Dumas, Flaubert, de Beauvoir. For many Americans, even the dedicated Francophiles, it can seem like French literature got the guillotine sometime around 1950.
Even popular contemporary French authors like Annie Ernaux and Anne Berest might have to wait years, even decades, to see some of their works translated into English. This sets French-language books up to be, at best, a slow burn, in an American market where genre fiction tends to be sucked down with the speed and insistency of a vape pen.
A category-defying exception has been the novel Moi qui n’ai pas connu les hommes, originally translated by Ros Schwartz under the title The Mistress of Silence, and, more recently, as I Who Have Never Known Men. Though published in French in 1995, the book was reissued in English in 2022, and has since gained a stunning readership thanks to #BookTok influencers, who spread the word of this previously underserved cult classic.
The slim dystopian novel follows a girl raised in captivity with 39 other women, all of whom have been imprisoned in an underground bunker for reasons unknown. One day, when the guards vanish, they manage to escape, only to find themselves utterly alone on a planet that is probably not Earth. Though their physical survival needs are easy to satisfy, their intellectual and emotional needs pose more of a struggle, and their ability to find some small measure of contentment in the face of a meaningless existence is a testament to the power of hope—and an exploration of its limitations.
It is not a book that is meant to be enjoyed so much as contemplated. The author, Jacqueline Harpman, spent her own childhood far from home, in Casablanca, after her Jewish family fled Belgium during the Nazi invasion. The specter of the Holocaust’s concentration camps had an undeniable influence on her writing, and the indignities of exile and imprisonment—presented as two sides of the same coin—are firmly at the heart of her most famous work.
So why would this little book of horrors be so appealing to American readers of today? Though many have likened its resurgence to that of The Handmaid’s Tale, which was fueled by concerns over women’s rights in the wake of the 2016 election, I think it bears more in common with a much more popular work of French literature: The Little Prince.
Hear me out—while Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s famed tome is marketed as a book for children, and Harpman’s is certainly not, there are thematic undercurrents and shared motifs that create some interesting parallels between the two works. Both bear the marks of their authors’ experiences in North Africa during the Second World War, which translate to themes of profound loneliness, visually represented in barren desert landscapes on foreign planets.
Both stories watch children as they explore (both physically, across vast distances, as well as intellectually), and uncover universal truths despite not really having anyone to steward them into adulthood. Curiosity becomes a means for survival, the one true weapon against despair. Adults are framed as willfully ignorant, caged in by myopic social conditioning. Love and loss go hand in hand, the former in many ways defined by the latter. Both stories end, depending on your interpretation, in dignified suicide.
Perhaps I Who Have Never Known Men speaks, on a subliminal level, to a generation of Francophiles raised on the exploits of Le Petit Prince. Hopefully, decades from now, it will hold onto the same level of staying power.
If you’re interested in having a read, a new collector’s edition has just been released—perhaps something to keep in mind for the upcoming holidays if you’ve got a Francophile bookworm in your life.
