{"id":1253,"date":"2026-08-07T19:38:55","date_gmt":"2026-08-07T19:38:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=1253"},"modified":"2026-08-07T19:38:55","modified_gmt":"2026-08-07T19:38:55","slug":"an-uncompromising-belgian-novelists-afterlife-as-a-booktok-star","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=1253","title":{"rendered":"An Uncompromising Belgian Novelist\u2019s Afterlife as a BookTok Star"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Go to any brick-and-mortar bookstore and you\u2019ll probably see at least one table dedicated to titles that \u201cpop on BookTok.\u201d Since around 2020, the literary precinct of the social-media platform TikTok seems to have usurped older marketing and publicity strategies as a primary driver of sales. The hashtag\u2019s more than fifty-two million videos tend to feature telegenic young people emoting in front of brightly colored shelves; the recommendations flow into each other, a self-replenishing stream. Many of the books the platform uplifts belong to commercial genres, such as romance and romantasy. But BookTok has also surfaced classics, including doorstops such as \u201cLonesome Dove\u201d and \u201cEast of Eden\u201d and short, lesser-known works in an emotional and lovelorn key, such as \u201cWhite Nights,\u201d from 1848, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and \u201cNo Longer Human,\u201d from 1948, by the Japanese novelist Osamu Dazai.<\/p>\n

Read more \u201cTony,\u201d \u201cLate Fame,\u201d and the Rocky Road to Literary Stardom<\/a><\/p>\n

If there\u2019s an overlooked treasure that BookTok most deserves credit for rediscovering, it might be \u201cI Who Have Never Known Men,\u201d a slender novel by the Belgian Jewish author Jacqueline Harpman, which first appeared in English in 1997. In 2022, the nonprofit publisher Transit Books reissued the novel in a revised translation, from the French, by Ros Schwartz. Largely thanks to social media, it has since sold more than eight hundred thousand copies in North America alone; Harpman, who died in 2012, has attained a posthumous internet celebrity, replete with honorary Google Doodle. This summer, Transit published a trio of her short stories, never before seen in English, under the title \u201cWe Were Forbidden.\u201d<\/p>\n

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BookTok\u2019s preferences may skew toward familiar beats and blunt-force sensation, but in Harpman the hive mind has alighted on something more capacious and slippery. \u201cI Who Have Never Known Men\u201d is a stubbornly unillusioned study of how isolation shapes and misshapes the human psyche. The book takes the form of a testimony that its nameless protagonist, the last survivor of an unknown catastrophe, is writing down as she dies of uterine cancer. Her earliest memories are of an underground bunker, patrolled by male guards with whips, where she was imprisoned with thirty-nine older women. She is innocent of parents, love, sex, what coffee tastes like, what an orange smells like, what the sky looks like.<\/p>\n

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Not quite halfway through the novel, the soldiers vanish, leaving a door unlocked, and the prisoners climb a hundred stairs to find a world of neutral plains and unremittingly mild weather. They never learn why they were jailed, what happened during their internment, or even whether they\u2019re on Earth or some other planet. They wander, encountering groups of dead captives, male and female, in bunkers like their own, but no living people. They build houses with stones and mud, cook communal meals, and forage for food and supplies. And then, one by one, they die, leaving the protagonist alone.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Harpman\u2019s picture of stripped-down desolation has resonated with many social-media users, who have praised the book\u2019s \u201chaunting\u201d story and likened it to \u201cstaring into a void.\u201d There\u2019s an incongruity to the fact that an austere twentieth-century work of dystopian science fiction, which was admired when it was released for its philosophical rigor and inward focus, is finding new life on a social platform built out of clips that are disposable by design. But \u201cI Who Have Never Known Men\u201d has a fruitful vagueness. The narrator, purged of identifiers except for her yearning, her rational faculties, and her sense of unbelonging, is counterintuitively relatable\u2014a portrait of rudimentary, universal humanity. (A whiff of melodrama to Harpman\u2019s vision probably plays well online, too.)<\/p>\n

It might also matter that \u201cI Who Have Never Known Men\u201d 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. What are the creative forms that persist after you\u2019ve disappeared? What enables an art work to transcend the stream? Harpman was writing in a different era, but the elegiac loneliness of her fiction anticipates our own solitary and screen-bound present. Is there anyone out there? her book seems to ask. How do I find you?<\/p>\n

Harpman was born in Etterbeek, Belgium, in 1929. During the Nazi occupation, she and her family fled to Morocco, where they lived until the end of the war, escaping the fate of several relatives on her father\u2019s side, who died in Auschwitz. Back in her home country, Harpman began studying medicine, but had to stop after she contracted tuberculosis. She convalesced in a sanatorium for two years\u2014an experience that, like the nightmare still fresh in the memory of European Jews, may have filtered into her prison plot. Her first book, \u201cLove and Acacia,\u201d was published in 1958, when she was nearing thirty, but she composed the majority of her fourteen novels in her fifties, sixties, and seventies. In the interim, she trained in psychology, and in 1980 she qualified as a psychoanalyst. (Her undergraduate dissertation was on Rorschach tests.) Appreciated but not idolized in her lifetime, she won a handful of prizes, including the Prix M\u00e9dicis for \u201cOrlanda,\u201d from 1996, about a woman whose tomboyish tendencies split off from the rest of her psyche and jump into the body of a music journalist.<\/p>\n

Most of Harpman\u2019s work that has so far been translated into English circles feelings of entrapment, disorientation, and exile. Psychoanalytic concepts\u2014projection, attachment, wishes and wish fulfillment\u2014loom large. Harpman portrays sexual fantasy, and its relation to writing, with startling frankness. Isolation becomes both an affliction and a muse in \u201cI Who Have Never Known Men,\u201d as the narrator spins out a sequence of erotic stories in her head. They star her youngest jailer, who, like his fellows, is forbidden to interact with his charges. (In a rare, sly note of comedy, she also stares at him incessantly, telling another woman that this is a form of resistance, and that she\u2019s \u201cinvented something unexpected.\u201d) Each fantasy, the girl says, produces \u201can extraordinary burst of light exploding inside me.\u201d In pursuit of this \u201ceruption,\u201d she tells herself \u201cincreasingly long and complicated stories,\u201d trying to outsmart her \u201cinner audience\u201d and retain the element of surprise. \u201cMy imagination developed,\u201d she reports. \u201cI had to exercise rigorous discipline.\u201d Sometimes one part of her wants to get to the finale, but another part, \u201centranced by the pleasure of listening,\u201d would prefer that the narrative keep going.<\/p>\n

As the girl\u2019s process evolves, the fictions themselves become at least as important as their physical effects, and a series of recurring characters turn into \u201cold friends.\u201d Her wistful hope is that a good enough story might yield companions so detailed and lively that they can satisfy her hunger for connection. She doesn\u2019t realize how limited these friends are until she discovers books.<\/p>\n

Read more The Modern R. & B. of Olivia Dean and Baby Rose<\/a><\/p>\n

Poignantly, given that all the living men in the novel are incarcerators, the narrator directs little hostility toward traditional masculine ideals. In fact, her account often seems suffused with longing for heterosexual relationships\u2014for the husbands and the lovers that she, unlike the elder women in the bunker, will never have. \u201cHow could I consider myself a human being, I who have only known thirty-nine people and all of them women?\u201d she asks. By this point, she no longer experiences eruptions, but she\u2019s still conjuring up men. When death comes for her, she writes, \u201cI will take my last ten steps to go and put these sheets of paper on the table\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. an emaciated old woman whose eyes, which no hand will close, will always be looking toward the door.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Yet is it really a man she\u2019s waiting for, or some other type of partner? \u201cPerhaps I have tried to create time\u201d with the memoir project, the woman speculates. She is writing \u201cfor some unknown reader,\u201d she continues, who will admit her work into their mind: \u201cThe reader and I thus mingled will constitute something living, that will not be me, because I will be dead, and will not be that person as they were before.\u201d It\u2019s an erotic fantasy that morphs into a metaphor of literary generation as sexual reproduction. Writing creates a life that will sustain the woman\u2019s legacy\u2014as long as someone is there to apprehend it. \u201cMost likely no one will come,\u201d she concludes.<\/p>\n

As potent as Harpman\u2019s novel is, there\u2019s an adolescent quality to \u201cI Who Have Never Known Men,\u201d which broods on its themes like a teen-ager who has just discovered existentialism. The book\u2019s post-apocalyptic setting ennobles its meditations on selfhood and finitude; the narrator\u2019s search for perpetuity is lent an unshakable gravity by her circumstances.<\/p>\n

For readers who first met Harpman via her melancholic digital afterlife, \u201cWe Were Forbidden\u201d will arrive as a revelation. The gem of the collection is its longest story, \u201cThe Broom Closet,\u201d a sex farce that wrangles its author\u2019s ideas about artistic permanence into a more prosaic form. The tale begins with a successful novelist in late middle age boarding a train after a publishing event. When her gaze falls on a stranger in the dining car, she\u2019s overtaken by a fantasy involving a dashing army officer in Central Europe in the nineteen-twenties. In the daydream, she is a young and beautiful judge\u2019s wife in \u201clong suede gloves that buttoned up to the elbows,\u201d and the artilleryman seduces her at the magistrates\u2019 ball. They have sex in the titular closet (\u201cWe toppled over together among the feather dusters\u201d); she\u2019s been so sheltered in her marriage that, somewhat implausibly, she has never seen a penis. But she\u2019s a quick study, and is soon plotting her husband\u2019s murder, enlisting the aid of an assassin whom he has recently sentenced to death.<\/p>\n

Unlike the unremittingly bleak and occasionally self-serious \u201cI Who Have Never Known Men,\u201d \u201cThe Broom Closet\u201d is arch, light-fingered, and very funny. But its narrator follows the same progression from fantasy to fiction-making. Her adultery story initially evokes the imprisoned girl\u2019s compensatory reveries, but over time its focus shifts. She grows increasingly invested in her side characters, lavishing attention and energy on scenes that have little to do with the original seduction. In the most affecting subplot, the assassin the wife has hired to kill her husband appears at the husband\u2019s bedside, unaware that he is already dying (the diagnosis is \u201cacute appendicitis, with necrotic enterocolitis\u201d). Nature takes its course while the would-be murderer watches. \u201cPoor us, little souls wandering through the chaos of our lives,\u201d the author cries, in a voice that might be the husband\u2019s, or the hit man\u2019s, or her own. She\u2019s gone from dreaming up person-shaped sex toys to mourning a supporting cast member, extending her imaginative empathy so far that she can\u2019t bring herself to allow one of her creations to be offed without ceremony.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The narrator of \u201cThe Broom Closet\u201d can claim firsthand, intimate knowledge of men: she mentions a husband. But she doesn\u2019t seem especially enamored of the guy, though she apparently lacks her alter ego\u2019s taste for mariticide. What capacity she has for deep connection is expressed in her fiction. Like the child in \u201cI Who Have Never Known Men,\u201d she is preoccupied with her historical impact and pessimistic about the chance that her words will outlast her (albeit for reasons of literary fashion rather than planetary catastrophe). \u201cI wanted to be loved, respected, and appreciated,\u201d she writes, \u201cbut I will be forgotten.\u201d She thinks that, if she\u2019s lucky, a novel of hers \u201cwill be lying in the bookcase of one of my great-grandchildren, yellowing, dried up, likely to crumble to the touch\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. and my great-grandson\u2019s new girlfriend will open it, read a few lines, and say: \u2018Whoa! That style of writing is so outdated.\u2019 Which will bury me once and for all.\u201d Alienation may have acquired a kind of tragic glamour in Harpman\u2019s best-known novel, but \u201cThe Broom Closet\u201d renders it unremarkable, a function of quotidian human differences and difficulties rather than the end of the world.<\/p>\n

At one point in \u201cI Who Have Never Known Men,\u201d the narrator stumbles upon an abandoned home and, as BookTok might put it, is \u201cutterly ruined\u201d by what she discovers: walls \u201ccovered in a beautiful wood with a dark sheen,\u201d carpets, paintings, vases, \u201ca small carving.\u201d The museumlike \u201cinterplay of lines, shapes and harmonious colours\u201d brings her to tears.<\/p>\n

The scene enlarges the nature of the narrator\u2019s quest: she\u2019s not looking for just a romantic partner or even a reader who will preserve her memory. What she has been starving for, more than individual people, is what people create together. Her profound loneliness stems from her lack of access to human culture, a set of shared traditions that survives one\u2019s particular life and links it to the past and the future. If Harpman\u2019s work has jumped from her time into our own, it may be because she appreciates the fragility of this emergent property of existence but honors it anyway. Her books attest to the potential for solitary selves to meet, merge, and multiply, producing something more beautiful and enduring than they can alone.\u00a0\u2666<\/p>\n

Read more Are Psychedelics Right-Wing Now?<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Katy Waldman on Jacqueline Harpman, a Belgian Jewish author and psychoanalyst whose fiction has become an unlikely BookTok sensation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1252,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1253","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books"],"yoast_head":"\nAn Uncompromising Belgian Novelist\u2019s Afterlife as a BookTok Star - City Relocation News<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=1253\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"An Uncompromising Belgian Novelist\u2019s Afterlife as a BookTok Star - City Relocation News\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Katy Waldman on Jacqueline Harpman, a Belgian Jewish author and psychoanalyst whose fiction has become an unlikely BookTok sensation.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=1253\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"City Relocation News\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-08-07T19:38:55+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/media.newyorker.com\/photos\/698119ed6a56722b07c239d6\/1:1\/w_200%2Cc_limit\/bestbooks2026_headermobile_animation_callout1.gif\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"11 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=1253#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=1253\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"admin\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/3e7ce0c0c60d21e12a5ac61fb2b786d4\"},\"headline\":\"An Uncompromising Belgian Novelist\u2019s Afterlife as a BookTok Star\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-08-07T19:38:55+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=1253\"},\"wordCount\":2244,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=1253#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/08\\\/4928c43fb51258cdb6002450bc42a7b4.webp\",\"articleSection\":[\"Books\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=1253#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=1253\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=1253\",\"name\":\"An Uncompromising Belgian Novelist\u2019s Afterlife as a BookTok Star - 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