The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden — secrets and passion in a Dutch house
The Safekeep was one of the more interesting sounding novels shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize. The debut novel of Dutch author Yael van der Wouden promised a tale about an aspect of World War 2 that seldom gets touched on in fiction — what happened to all the homes and goods of families who were sent to concentration camps, never to return?
Yael van der Wouden exposes the callousness of people in Netherlands towards the fate of their Jewish neighbours. All the houses left abandoned when their Jewish occupants were forcibly removed, were simply taken over by other local families, along with all their furniture. For years, these new “owners” kept up a pretence that these properties were simply “gifts” or legitimately acquired.
“If they cared about it, they would have come back for it,” says one character about a Jewish family who lost their home. Another justifies their acquisition by placing the blame on the original owners of the property:
“Yes a family lived there. But they left. They did not pay their mortgage, the did not pay their taxes. This happens, it happens every day, people make commitments they cannot keep, people pack up and leave and they don’t take — their plates and their spoons. It happens every day. There is nothing untoward here.”
How can you pay taxes and mortgages when you are fighting for your life in a concentration camp? How can you return to claim your home if you’ve been killed? The glib way in which these new occupants justify their actions is shocking. I wonder whether they really did believe they were justified or that they hide their guilt by repeating such statements over and over, trying to convince themselves they were right.
These issues come to the forefront in the third and final section of The Safekeep, played out in the story of one woman, the sole occupant of a large house in the rural Dutch province of Overijssel.
Isabel’s parents moved to this house with their three children to escape the bombs that rained down on Amsterdam. Now, 15 years after the war ended, only Isabel remains at the property, keeping the family legacy intact by obsessively cleaning the dinner plates and other objects once cherished by her mother.
Everything in this house must be preserved just the way it was when her mother was alive. It means Isabel must always be on her guard, particularly where her maid is concerned for she suspects the young girl is pocketing some of the spoons.
The arrival of her brother’s new girlfriend marks a turning point in Isabel’s life. Eva is everything Isabel is not; full of vigour and flamboyant in dress and manner. Isabel resents everything about this newcomer, the way she just keeps asking questions about her family and touching all the vases and dishes. Just a few hours in her presence is enough of an ordeal but then Louis throws a bombshell — Eva will be staying in the house for a few weeks while he swans off to work overseas.
The tension between these two women is beautifully handled. Unfortunately Yael van der Wouden goes and spoils it all with that all too familiar plot development which has hate turning into love. So in the middle section we get Isabel’s awakening into joy and passion. A few pages would have been sufficient to show the intensity of their love but instead we get page after page of sex. It’s all really unnecessary and boring, spoiling what was otherwise a powerful and intriguing novel.
As a debut novel, there is so much to appreciate about The Safekeep. Yael van der Wouden captures so well the emptiness of Isabel’s life and the terrible loneliness from which she suffers. I enjoyed too, the way that a historical injustice is made very personal through the example of one family. It would have been an even better book however with less groaning and heavy breathing.
2024 — My Life in Book Titles : BookerTalk
[…] never been to The Safe Keep by Yale van Der […]
MarketGardenReader/IntegratedExpat
I haven’t seen any of the Dutch response to this, so Liliane’s reaction above is enlightening. I have listened to a couple of British podcasts discussing it and they managed to totally avoid revealing what the big secret was in the house. Now I know, I’m even more intrigued to read it. I suspect some of the adverse Dutch reaction is due to the fact that Yael van der Wouden is only half Dutch and hasn’t lived in the Netherlands her whole life. She grew up in Israel, so it’s hardly surprising she would pick up on anything questionable about the Dutch record with Jews in WWII. Understandably, most people would prefer to celebrate Dutch tolerance and those who sheltered or helped Jewish people in the war. As for the infamous chapter ten, the general consensus seems to be that it’s a bit much, but does tap into Dutch literature’s tendency to (in my opinion) over sexualise every story.
I shall just have to read it to find out for myself.
A Life in Books
I was keen to read this one but it sounds like it’s been somewhat clunking executed.
BookerTalk
Everything works well except for the middle section which is the love affair between the two women. The level of detail was so excessive and didn’t add anything to the narrative really
Cathy746books
I quite enjoyed this, but found that the middle part sagged a little and I felt the ending was a touch too contrived for me.
BookerTalk
I think she did try to wrap everything up a bit too neatly, It would have been more interesting to leave us wondering what happened next and whether justice was done
margaret21
Having read both your review and all the comments I’m less sure I want to read this. The facts of the case are little known – certainly here in the UK – so this would have been fascinating to read about. But it sounds as if it’s been clumsily handled, and perhaps cheapened a bit. Yet you are clearly ambivalent about it. How has distance from the week in which you read it changed your opinion, if at all?
BookerTalk
Good question Margaret. I don’t think my overall view has changed – it was an interesting book but could have been even more interesting if she’d cut down on the sex scenes and devoted more time to the question of guilt/responsibility for the past.
margaret21
I’ll have to read it for myself and see what I think.
Anokatony
I will politely disagree. Isabel is a very lonely person, and she finds love. I did not think the sex scenes were overdone. Very lonely people fall hard.
BookerTalk
I accept that people who’ve had such a limited experience can find their newly discovered passion almost overwhelming. My point was really that the amount of attention paid to the physicality was excessive – we could easily have understood the point with about half that page count
Simon at Tredynas Days
I agree that the sex/love elements weakened an otherwise powerful story.
BookerTalk
I felt that those pages really dragged….
kaggsysbookishramblings
How bizarre. It sounds like wasted potential, and the two strong elements of the story definitely don’t sit well together!!
BookerTalk
Yes there was certainly potential to explore the guilt/culpability (or lack of) in greater depth.
Lisa Hill
I was going to say that I thought this sounded excellent, but then I read what Liliane Ruyters has to say in her comment, and I immediately thought of that wretched book, The Tattooist of Auschwitz, using the Holocaust to write a bestseller. From what Liliane says, it sounds as if they’ve sexed up this story with romance to make it more marketable.
After what happened in Amsterdam last week, it sounds as if there’s much more to do in terms of tackling antisemitism than just facing up to history.
BookerTalk
I shudder every time someone recommends I read The Tattooist of Auschwitz or all the similar books it spawned. I don’t think Yael Van Der Wouden included that sex element just to sell more copies. I didn’t have any issue accepting that Isabel would enter into an intense physical relationship – the poor woman has repressed every other feeling until now — my real issue was with the extended nature of the narrative dealing with that relationship. It just went on and on and on
TravellinPenguin
How sad.
BookerTalk
Sad for the country or for the two women who are impacted by decisions made by others?
Liliane Ruyters
The Safekeep was not received positively in my home country, the Netherlands. Everybody recognized the need to finally tell this tale of our horrible behaviour after World War 2 ended. Our treatment of the Jews during and after the war was wrong. It took a long time for the Dutch to acknowledge this. Combining this part of our history with a love story putting lots and lots of emphasis on the steamy sexy did not go down well. It made people feel that history had been unnecessarily degraded. I felt that I had been reading two separate stories. Both of them would have been better of handled in its own right. Both of them contained elements that could have made for excellent novels. Together they failed to work. I applaud Van der Wouden for sharing my country’s blemished past, I am sorry she failed to write a better novel.
BookerTalk
Thanks Liliane for sharing this insight about how the novel was received by people in the Netherlands. It’s so interesting to hear that people felt the sex component was to the detriment of the content exploring the question of the country’s past. I hadn’t thought about it until now but on reflection it does seem like two stories jammed together to make something of the write length to be counted as a novel.