BookLife Review by Carol O'Day: The Safekeep (Yael Van Der Wouden, author)
Historical fiction, Booker Prize nominee, post-WWII Netherlands, 1960s, adult siblings, childhood trauma, Jewish survivor and LGBTQ+ characters, repression, passion, loss, longing, redemption
Shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize, Yael Van Der Wouden’s novel, The Safekeep, peels back the veil on a rarely seen corner of World War II history–rural Netherlands in the years following World War II. Central to the novel are several adults who were impacted by the War as children in dramatically different but linked ways.
Isabel and her two brothers, Hendrik and Louis, were evacuated with their mother to a small town outside of Amsterdam to be kept safe from wartime bombings in the city. Her uncle purchased a house for them. Their uncle designated that the house would pass to Louis, the eldest, when he marries, on the assumption that daughter Isabel would marry and move away. After the siblings’ mother’s death, Isabel is unmarried and lives alone in the family home. Louis is a serial dater and lives in the city in a rental, and Hendrik lives with his lover, Sebastian. Isabel is tightly wound, obsessive and traumatized by the experience of the war. She is deeply possessive of the home and its furnishings. She counts and tracks its contents and regularly fears that the housekeeper may be stealing things.
Louis meets Eva who moves into his rooms at his apartment. When Louis is called out of town on business, he insists that Eva stay with Isabel at the family home. Isabel takes an instant dislike to Eva and is distraught at the perceived intrusion. Isabel’s repressed sexuality is evident early in the book. She shudders and shuns the advances of a male neighbor who attempts to woo her. Her intense response to and fascination with Eva masks her attraction to her. In Louis’s absence, Isabel and Eva become lovers.
At the close of Part II, Louis threatens to return from his trip with a new woman in tow, and he asks Isabel to send Eva away. Because Isabel cannot disclose her relationship with Eva and object to her elder brother’s directive, she withholds the news of Louis’ new love and just tells Eva that Louis is returning. Not knowing that Louis has replaced her, Eva insists that she must reunite with Louis and end her affair with Isabel. Hurt, Isabel tells Eva that Louis has replaced Eva with a new woman. Isabel evicts Eva and breaks her own heart. Louis returns with yet another potential wife.
Spoiler alert-there is no way to complete the review without revealing the twist that is presented in Part III of the book. In her distress, Isabel discovers Eva’s journal, and reads it. Eva’s journal begins in 1960 but recounts events from her childhood. Eva is the daughter of the original, Jewish owners of the house. She too was sent away to live in hiding during the war. Her father was sent to a Nazi prison camp during the war and was killed. Her mother was unable to pay the mortgage and lost the family house. In the parlance of the time, homes of Jews caught in the horrors of the camps were taken over for “safekeeping,” essentially sold by the banks in foreclosure. Eva grows up longing to reclaim her family’s home. She concocts a plan. She learns the identity of the heir to the home, Louis, and she maneuvers to meet him. Eva pretends to fall in love with Louis, with an eye toward securing her prior home through him.
Isabel’s future happiness and Eva’s depend upon their ability to forge a path forward in an era where anti-Semitism abounds and same-sex relationships are wholly unacceptable if not entirely illegal. Isabel schemes to have the house transferred to her instead of Louis. Isabel’s release and growth over the course of the novel is profound, though she remains fragile and wounded.
Van Der Wouden creates in Isabel an extremely prickly protagonist, so repressed and angry at the world for the death of her mother, and wounded by her brothers’ departures to lives of their own, that she can barely get through a day. Her obsessive behavior, biting critiques and intolerance of others, and her inability to face change in any form, leap off the pages. Her mother rejected Hendrik for his homosexuality, and Isabel internalizes that disapproval on her mother’s behalf, drenching herself in her own self-loathing. Isabel also carries the trauma of the war and, in particular, vague childhood memories that unsettle her sense of security. Not only were Isabel and her siblings displaced as children in an unstable wartime period, but Isabel harbors vague memories of threats to her home; she recalls people in need banging at their door, seeking food and shelter.
Read The Safekeep for a dark and insightful look into post War life in a Dutch village, a microcosm that represents the larger world. Its themes of loss, longing, regret, and redemption make The Safekeep a worthy Booker Prize finalist.
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