The Safekeep

This was a great novel. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Van der Wouden’s Safekeep explores the relationship of two young women set in the Netherlands in the early 60’s. Isabel cares for the house she grew up in,where she now lives alone since the death of her mother. Her brothers Hendrik and Louis have moved on and though the house officially belongs to Louis, it is Isabel who tends to the garden and manages the housekeeping. “She belonged to the house in the sense that she had nothing else, no other life than the house, but the house, by itself, did not belong to her. “
Her life changes when Louis needs a favor: he is about to leave for an important business trip and will need his girlfriend Eva to stay with Isabel in the show more family home. They are opposites. Isabel is cold and suspicious of Eva stealing, while Eva just seems to want to have fun, try to get her stuck up housemate to open up. “EVA TOOK UP SPACE WITH a loud restlessness, a bee stuck in a room with all the windows shut.
Can’t say too much without spoiling the complex relationship that unfolds and the plot shifts that then turn the narrative into something else entirely. What’s great about historical fiction is making an event, like the shameful treatment of the Jews by the Dutch, into a personal narrative exploring all the complexities involved. The writing is sharp, crisp and sexually blunt. Highly recommend and look forward to future works from this author.
From the Booker Prize:

“Set in the early 1960s in the Netherlands in an isolated house, ‘The Safekeep’ draws us into a world as carefully calibrated as a Dutch still-life. … We loved this debut novel for its remarkable inhabitation of obsession. It navigates an emotional landscape of loss and return in an unforgettable way.”

Lines:

She had a violently peroxided bob, a badly made dress—the bodice had been sewn too tight and the hems were messy. Her face was very red. She was pretty in a way men thought women ought to be pretty.

Isabel said it in the way she meant it: that Eva seemed like the kind of person to have plenty of friends, and that this, in Isabel’s view, spoke badly of her. Friendship had always seemed a distrustful thing to Isabel.

What was the worth of happiness that left behind a crater thrice the size of its impact.

The terror was as wide as the want: a boulder moved from the gaping mouth of a cave.

How quickly did the belly of despair turn itself over into hope, the give of the skin of overripe fruit.

She had held a pear in her hand and she had eaten it skin and all. She had eaten the stem and she had eaten its seeds and she had eaten its core, and the hunger still sat in her like an open maw. She thought: I can hold you and find that I still miss your body. She thought: I can listen to you speak and still miss the sound of your voice.

Little baby Jesus everywhere. They have no problem letting Jews into their homes as long as they’re carved from wood, do they.

The sun is so soft and everything is in bloom and the air smells like an exclamation mark for something that’s about to happen.

Her face, I swear. Not even honey could sweeten that vinegar.

Found that love was a sickly thing that punished you for each step you took in its direction.

The canals had frozen over. Isabel tested one with her foot and found it solid, and then stood on it in wonder: a miracle, she thought, to stand so solidly on what could also engulf you. show less

That The Safekeep won one major literary award and was shortlisted for an even more prominent one is something of an indictment of book prizes. This is not just overpraised, it's inexplicably praised.

The book's copy promised an "exhilarating, twisted tale of desire, suspicion, and obsession", but this is milquetoast, a BBC Sunday night period drama crossed with the aesthetics of a Sarah Waters novel. The ending is sentimental and unconvincing. Yael van der Wouden's characterisation feels contrived and Eva and Isabel together have all the crackling erotic tension between them of a sapphic movie starring Dakota Johnson and Gal Gadot.

Despite that, The Safekeep might have landed as a mid book for me—a clumsy first book with some worthy show more themes—if not for how I kept tripping over its prose. Before I picked this up, I'd seen multiple professional reviews praise it for its "fine and taut" writing. That is not a quality which this book possesses. Van der Wouden has a number of rhetorical tics which a good editor should have called her on, but even a merely competent editor should have hauled her up on sentences which on a fundamental mechanical level do not work. For example:

“Isabel let her. Looked up at her, slow. She was close. She smelled of wet cloth. She was heat, too. Her belly, so near, the rapid rise and fall of it.”

“She stepped into the bracket of Isabel’s knees, a hiccupped sound, and Isabel swayed, put her face to Eva—her soft stomach.”

I get the kind of poetic affect this is striving for, but it doesn't reach it. It's just clumsy. And then sentences like this one:

"The shadows lifted as though they’d only been glimpsed under the hem of a skirt—the lift on an arm, secrets of the body that only unfolded for the night."

This simply doesn't make sense. (Van der Wouden is Dutch, but wrote the book in English. This is not an issue of an incompetent translator.)

And then there was the aspect of the prose which is perhaps nitpicky, but was the straw that broke the camel’s back and tipped me over from mild irritation with this book to full on disdain. The book is written in English, but as is often the case in literature we take it for granted that the characters are “really” speaking Dutch. That is a convention I’m fine with, even if at times you might be left wondering if a certain expression or curse or turn of phrase truly has its equivalent in the language the characters are “really speaking.” That’s something you can handwave.

But more than once Van der Wouden does something like this moment, when Eva and Isabel are looking at an old cuddly toy in the shape of a hare. Eva asks her what the name of the toy is: “Haas," Isabel said: hare.” Why is she mentally translating this word? Why does it remain in Dutch when everything else gets translated? (I mean I know why, it’s because of the Thematic Symbolism later to be revealed about the house and Eva’s name, but surely to God if you feel like haas has to stay in Dutch, you could find a more elegant way of conveying that info for the Anglophone reader?) Nitpicky, you may be thinking to yourself! Fair enough.

But then we get to the point which actually made me say “Oh for fuck’s sake” out loud. Eva and Isabel are getting ready to go out for dinner, but get distracted by making out with one another—and here is where I should say that while I am niet vloeiend, I have decent reading comprehension of Dutch. In the scene, Eva pulls back and says “Reservations.” This initially sparks Isabel into a flurry of panic thinking that Eva has reservations about their relationship, before she realises that Eva meant reservations as in “we have to be at the restaurant very soon.” Now not only is this just a kind of clunky miscommunication trope reminiscent of formulaic fanfiction, remember: they are “actually” speaking in Dutch.

And I, with my basic knowledge of Dutch, know that reservations as in “I have some reservations about this” is bedenkingen, while a reservation as in “I have a dinner reservation” is reservering. I, a non-native Dutch speaker know this. So why does actual native Dutch speaker Van der Wouden write it? Like so much of the rest of the prose in this book, it’s clumsy and not thought-through. There is no craft here.

I have to believe that this won the Women’s Prize because two other books split the judges’ vote. show less

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: An exhilarating, twisted tale of desire, suspicion, and obsession between two women staying in the same house in the Dutch countryside during the summer of 1961—a powerful exploration of the legacy of WWII and the darker parts of our collective past.

A house is a precious thing...

It is 1961 and the rural Dutch province of Overijssel is quiet. Bomb craters have been filled, buildings reconstructed, and the war is truly over. Living alone in her late mother’s country home, Isabel knows her life is as it should be—led by routine and discipline. But all is upended when her brother Louis brings his graceless new girlfriend Eva, leaving her at Isabel’s doorstep as a guest, to stay for the show more season.

Eva is Isabel’s antithesis: she sleeps late, walks loudly through the house, and touches things she shouldn’t. In response, Isabel develops a fury-fueled obsession, and when things start disappearing around the house—a spoon, a knife, a bowl—Isabel’s suspicions begin to spiral. In the sweltering peak of summer, Isabel’s paranoia gives way to infatuation—leading to a discovery that unravels all Isabel has ever known. The war might not be well and truly over after all, and neither Eva—nor the house in which they live—are what they seem.

Mysterious, sophisticated, sensual, and infused with intrigue, atmosphere, and sex, The Safekeep is a brilliantly plotted and provocative debut novel you won’t soon forget.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Opposites attract. Hard to argue with that for most grown folks; but it's also hard to see what these women see in each other. Their oppositeness is deep-rooted, identity-forming stuff. That level and degree of oppositeness is hard to overcome; one partner's ordinary life is an existential rejection of the other.

Isabel takes the idea of the houseproud Dutch woman very much to an extreme. Eva presages women's liberation's rejection of housewife as an identity; she's free-spirited and unmaterialistic. That comes across to Isabel as outrageous disrespect to herself and her poor, abused house.

What caused these radically ill-suited women to fall for each other? Forced proximity? I don't rightly know. They manage to have sex. I won't call it making love; and honestly how did pissy, controlling Isabel ever let herself get involved in something as inherently dirty, messy, and collaborative as sex in the first place?

I have questions about this. None are answered.

I read most of the book thinking I'd be stretching to three stars. The events at the end of the book...the way their romance does what Love really does to the Lover and the Beloved...got me a fractional hair over the four-star line. It's a first novel and there are some ways events are presented that do not help the reader invest in the plot. It's a strain to do some of the emotional heavy lifting because Isabel and Eva are so weirdly assorted as partners for more than a one-night fling that I kept needing to remind myself to tamp my eyebrows back down out of my hairline.

But Isabel says a line that shoved me there, one I can't repeat because the Spoiler Stasi has its truncheons and tasers ever at the ready...grow the fuck up, y'all...but its delicate evocation of the awareness od the importance of the persona in intimacy that explained a lot of the book to me.

It's a big risk to leave something so important so late. I'm glad I didn't bail before I got there. I hope Author van der Wouden does something new soon. show less

This is a book that builds its tension quietly, almost politely at first, and then gradually makes it clear that nothing in its emotional architecture is accidental. What I liked most is how controlled it feels—every interaction seems to carry more weight than it initially admits to, and the novel trusts the reader to sit with that slow accumulation rather than rush toward explanation. It has a restrained intensity that suits its themes well. By the end, it lands in that satisfying space where everything feels both carefully contained and slightly unsettled.

The Safekeep, Yael van der Wouden’s artfully wrought debut novel tells a suspenseful tale with origins stretching back a decade and a half, to the German occupation of The Netherlands during WWII. It’s 1961. The war is long past, but reminders persist in the form of scars on the landscape and bombed-out buildings. Isabel, in her late 20s, lives alone in the family home in quiet, provincial Overijssel. Isabel is a febrile creature, anxious, quick to take offense and, some might say, obsessively protective of the family’s property. Her two brothers, Hendrik and Louis, are both living elsewhere, Louis on his own in Amsterdam, where he is working his way through a seemingly endless succession of girlfriends, and Hendrik with his show more companion of many years, Sebastian. The house is Isabel’s life. She keeps a watchful eye, tending the garden precisely as her recently deceased mother would want and maintaining the family treasures—the silver, porcelain, antiques, etc.—in sparkling order. But a shadow hangs over Isabel, one which she is powerless to dispel. During the war, the family was forced to flee Amsterdam, leaving their home and possessions behind. Isabel’s uncle Karel came to the rescue and found them the house she lives in, furnished, everything in place. It’s where the three siblings grew up and where their mother lived out her life. As the eldest child, the house has been promised to Louis. When he marries, he’ll move in with his wife and they’ll raise their family. And when that happens, Isabel has no idea what she will do. This circumstance is important to van der Wouden’s story because it explains, in part, why Isabel reacts so icily to Eva, Louis’s latest girlfriend, when he brings her home for a meal and to see the house. Isabel is not impressed, and regards Eva, with her airs, her endless curiosity about the house and its contents, her stubborn affability in the face of Isabel’s pointed rudeness, and the clumsily disguised threadbare condition of her clothes, as a threat and something of an imposter. So, Isabel is caught off guard and more than simply annoyed when, shortly after the dinner, Louis contacts her to say that he’s going to be away for a few weeks on business and suggesting that Eva stay with Isabel at the house, essentially giving his sister no choice in the matter. Eva arrives with her meagre belongings. Initially, Isabel remains distant and mistrustful, the watchful eye ever on the alert. Strangely, though, after a rough start, a line of communication opens between the two women, based on shared vulnerabilities, and a bond forms that strengthens with each passing day until both are dreading Louis’s return. Which makes the breach, when it happens, all the more shocking. Yael van der Wouden’s tale of forgiveness and redemption continues as Isabel uncovers a truth that she’d never suspected, though the clues have always been plentiful. The Safekeep is a chilling and astonishing work, full of unexpected twists, surprising turns and high emotion that peels back the layers cloaking a gut-wrenching aspect of Europe’s dark 20th Century. show less

Full review to come after work (I finished this on the subway this morning.) Controversial take: This is a very literary, very beautifully written historical romance. From the moment there was forced proximity (only one hotel room!) I recognized the structure for romance had been in place throughout. It is also a sensitive if dramatic examination of the aftermath of the Final Solution. If you can't tell, I loved the book.
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Full review time. This is gorgeously written, but I am surprised it has gotten love from the big prizes because it is a historical romance, and that doesn't usually arouse the interest of the Booker committee. For those not schooled in the tropes of genre romance what we have here is a grumpy-sunshine show more forced proximity tale. There is even an unexpected hotel stay and there is only one room. That is classic genre romance! The book has a moderate to high spice level. I am not being dismissive when I say this is historical romance, I adore genre romance when done well, I read a lot of it, and this is done well.

I am not much for recapping books so I will just mention a few facts I think are needed for context before I complain about one aspect of the book (and praise others.) The book is set in the Netherlands in the early 60s. Isabel is a spectacularly unpleasant woman who is living in the family house in the country while her two brothers (one a libertine who "falls in love" with startling frequency and one a Gay man in a long-term committed but necessarily hush-hush relationship) head off to the city to lead their lives. Isabel cares for the house and its contents obsessively though it is entailed to the oldest male. She is hateful to everyone from the cleaning woman to shopkeepers, to the man who (inexplicably) pursues her, and she is perhaps most hateful of all to her brothers' love interests, Eva (who is the other main character) and Sebastian. And then, she is transformed by love. There is no build to this. This horrid person who has never even kissed another finds sex and suddenly she cares about others. This is a thing that happens in romance and I complain about it a lot, and I will complain about it here. The "she just needed to get laid" plotline is absurd and insulting, Sure, most of us are a little sunnier after a good orgasm (or really even after a mediocre orgasm) but our personalities do not transmogrify. Also in this book Isabel is so horrid it is impossible to understand how anyone falls in love with her (and that does happen here.) Isabel is not evil, she is pathetic. She is scared, obsessive, and judgmental and pushes everyone away. I am not saying people should hate her, just that it is almost certain they would avoid her, and for good reason. In a traditional historical romance, the grumpy one is often a duke or at least a super-rich dude, and people don't shun him because, well, title and/or money. When women are the grumps in romance they are also generally of noble birth and/or rich, and also surpassingly beautiful. Here, there is something Isabel has that one of the love interests wants, and it would explain a choice to engage romantically for ulterior motives, but the book is clear that the love is real and I could only ask, why? Why would anyone fall in love with Isabel? (Also, once the sex begins Isabel becomes quite expert in moments after making it to a pretty ripe age without a kiss. In my experience, that does not happen.)

Here is where I remind you that I gave this 5 stars, that I tore through the book, and that I loved it. I was able to get around this thing that bugged me pretty easily, when those same complaints have led me to disliking many other romances. Why? Because this story was so good (there is a lot of story outside of the romance, but I don't want to spoil), so beautifully written, filled with such gorgeous metaphors and smart and incisive observations about people and how they interact that I didn't care that the romance of it all was underdeveloped. Also, there is real passion between our central love match and it is beautifully rendered. Even in print good sex can put one in a good mood and predispose them to not asking too many questions. Or at least it does that for me. And speaking of the sex, people seem to have an issue with it and I don't get it. It is a tad explicit, there is wetness and scent and penetration described, but it is healthy and loving sex between consenting adults and is kink-free. I am not sure what is bugging people, but if you feel like passionate generous sex between adult women (or between any people wherever they fall on the gender spectrum) should not include wetness, scent and penetration you may not want to read this. I mention that the sex is between two women because I have to imagine that is what has led to pearls being clutched.

In the end this was absorbing, filled with interesting characters and beautiful prose. It doesn't make my best of the best list, but I liked it a whole lot and maybe loved it. Also, I listened to the book, and the narrators, Stina Nielsen and Saskia Maarleveld, were excellent. show less

The Safekeep takes place in the 1960s in the Netherlands. It is a story of love, fear, loss, and hatred. Isabel, the main character, is for much of the novel, intensely unlikeable. She has two brothers, one older (Louis) and one younger (Hendrik). One day, Louis comes with his latest girlfriend (Eva) who is everything Isabel is not-undisciplined, messy, and perhaps overly friendly. It is a tribute to Yael van der Wouden’s talent that she makes these people who have messy lives, and are all more or less unpleasant, likeable. I found myself feeling for these people. We are all human, we are all at times more or less unpleasant, and we don’t always have neat lives. That’s what being human means.
Although there were hints, I did not show more see the ending coming. Was it a happy ending? I hope so.
And finally, I took to heart Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl when I was younger, and it came as somewhat a surprise that the Dutch were not as saintly as I thought. And in a throwaway line in the book, neither were the Swiss. Unfortunately, I guess this too is what it means to be human.
A wonderful book that I will be thinking about for a long time. show less