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There's no point rebelling. We must just wait until we die.

This book was a gift from a friend several months ago, but I finally read it recently and went through a hundred pages in a night, then the rest the next night. I read the first ten pages the day before, not fully invested yet, my head lingering somewhere else, but once I got into it that night, I found myself unable to stop. I thought of other things I could do, but all I did was turn and turn the page.

Forty women are prisoners in an underground bunker; the guards are men, but they never interact with the women. They don't know why they are there, just that they are. When the youngest start to question things, curious to learn, things change.

I loved this book so much. It feels like an old timer (which it sort of is, published in 1995), and I couldn't believe how Harpman was able to write so tenderly, with a composure that is calm in midst of the horrors in the lives they are trying to live in the unknown world. Was it even Earth, one could wonder? Those women got out of the prison by a stroke of luck that the men left in a rush due to some sirens, leaving the door open but is it any better in the plains where there are no cities, no seasons, nothing but bunkers every once in a while, just like theirs. It felt bleak, but those women kept looking. Questioning their purpose now and on as they reminiscence their lives before prison. Only the youngest is foreign to 'before', having never known what it is like to dance, what a book looks like, what it is like to love, so the way she could learn about those things is through other women who are forgetting the old days but attempt to tell them anyways.

It was only at the moment of death that they admired their despair and rushed headlong towards the great, dark doors that I opened for them, leaving the sterile pain where their lives had gone awry without a backward glance, eager to embrace another world which perhaps didn't exist, but they preferred nothingness to the futile succession of empty days.

It felt strongly a metaphor for the literal world we are living in. Why are we here? What's before the existence of humans, dinosaurs even? What was before it? Do we know? All that philosophical inquires becomes overwhelming, and it may just be for our sake to be present and live. We know we will die, and so we must go on living.

Death is sometimes so discreet that it steals in noiselessly, stays for only a moment, and carries off its prey, and I didn't notice the change.