The Safekeep (2024)

Why this one?

This was my final choice from the 2024 Booker Longlist, prior to the Shortlist reveal (on which it fortuitously featured). I’m not entirely sure why I picked this one, to be honest, but here we are!

Yael van der Wouden was born in Tel Aviv, Israel to an Israeli mother and Dutch father. She was brought up in the Netherlands, where she lives and works and a lecturer in creative writing and comparative literature. Her essay 'On (Not) Reading Anne Frank', on Dutch identity and Jewishness, was commended in The Best American Essays 2018. This is her debut novel, and makes her the first Dutch author to appear on the Booker shortlist. It was written in English (hence its eligibility for the Prize) although its Dutch translation, which van de Wouden co-translated herself, was published first.

Thoughts, etc.

The Safekeep begins in the early 1960s in the rural Dutch province of Overijssel. We meet the book’s central character, Isabel, who lives alone in her family home, following her mother’s death. She obsessively tends to the house, while knowing she is only a temporary occupant. The house will eventually pass to her elder brother Louis, who like her other brother Hendrick has no interest in living in the house, having left and embraced city life. The three siblings meet for a dinner early in the book, at which Louis introduces his latest girlfriend Eva, to whom Isabel is openly and viciously rude. When Louis is later called away for work, he insists that Eva stay in the family home with Isabel, much to the latter’s dismay.

This is a book about which it’s hard to say too much more without giving away its excellent twists and turns, so look away now if you don’t want to be even slightly spoilered!

It’s a book of at least three distinct parts. In the first, we get our introduction to Isabel, and it is very much not a favourable one. Her initial treatment of Eva is shockingly blunt, and inflected with at the very least a snobbish classism, if not something darker and more insidious. While she clearly cares deeply for her family, especially her late mother, the same cannot be said for most of the rest of humankind. The family home is kept by a young maid, to whom she is occasionally outwardly harsh but more generally oblivious to how much she contributes to her need for perfectionism in the house. We also learn that Isabel is paranoically suspicious, constantly assuming that her maid is stealing small items and doing things like counting her teaspoons as a result. Despite this, there’s something in the way she is written that keeps us from entirely hating her, which is important to the development of the rest of the novel.

The second part covers Eva’s stay at the house. It begins in similar form to the first, with Isabel aghast at Eva’s perceived laziness and other minor foibles, and despairing at the breaking up of her carefully crafted perfectionist palace. However, thinks take a rapid and unexpected turn. From this unusual coming together of personalities blooms an unlikely, and intensely passionate, sexual relationship. This section is incredibly well-handled, written with a total lack of fear and quite shockingly sexy (for a Booker nominee!) as a result. Isabel gains more of our sympathy from this point as we start to see the real person who up to this point has been pent up behind a giant dam of repression, suddenly and violently burst open in this section. We also learn in this section that Isabel’s brother Hendrick has been in a long-term relationship with another man. Isabel gets on well with them both, but has also treated their relationship as something to be kept quiet.

If this middle section is in its own way thrilling and unexpected, its final part is where the real twist lies. Thankfully I’m the sort of person who never spots twists early, so the unravelling of who Eva really is and why she has arrived in Isabel’s life did come as an almost complete surprise to me. Without totally giving the game away, the book shifts tone again, from character study to intense lesbian romance to something else entirely, a deep and provocative exploration of concepts of ownership in a postwar landscape. Isabel’s early paranoia about being stolen from is flipped dramatically as we learn about how her family came to live in their home.

I found this book absolutely gripping, a character-driven page-turner with intrigue simmering under the surface and bubbling up explosively as it goes along. It’s a book with revelations that throw what has gone before into question, demanding a reassessment of characters and situations. But it never does this at the expense of readability. It’s a book in which the central romance and brilliantly-drawn characters will appeal to a wide audience, but also one which cleverly brings in some weighty and (despite their historical setting) very much relevant themes around displacement, ownership and guilt. Its ending is more optimistic than I perhaps expected, but itself raises further interesting questions in a book that’s absolutely full of them.

Score

9.5

Another excellent book in what seems to be a very strong year for the Booker. Having barely got over the absence of the brilliant My Friends from the shortlist, I’m at least reassured that those books that were selected instead are continuing to deliver at the highest level.

Next up

Rachel Kushner’s rather exciting sounding Creation Lake.