Isabel den Brave’s life is a parable of duty. Home, church, visits to ageing relatives, the scrupulous task of counting household items to see that the housemaids have not lifted anything; her world is picked clean of the unexpected and the unorthodox.
After the departure of her two brothers, Hendrik and Louis, and the death of their mother, Isabel is alone in the house, a mausoleum of loss, and grows bitter from her multiple grievances. When Louis – a serial philanderer – introduces Isabel to his latest girlfriend, Eva, she is appalled. Everything about this bustling, chaotic and impulsive young woman is a goad to Isabel’s blistering self-righteousness. When it is decided that Eva will stay for a while in the family home (bequeathed to Louis) as he has to go on a business trip to London, disapproval shifts to open hostility.
In this remarkable first novel, shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize, Yael van der Wouden plots the incremental shifts in the relationship between the two women locked into their own battles with pasts that have a rare capacity to wound. These pasts come into view only gradually and are centred around the house that becomes the stage for a daunting war of emotional attrition. Van der Wouden is especially adept at tracking those changes in mood or emotion that are barely perceptible, and which nonetheless set the story moving in unforeseen directions. There is a startling poetic precision in her bringing a detail of a personality to life on the page (”Eva took up space with a loud restlessness”) or drawing attention to the minutiae of a natural scene (”The hot season’s night rustled in the way that winter’s never did, bugs dry in the bush, things that had business in the dark”).
Set in the 1960s, in the rural Dutch province of Overijssel, the novel also traces the difficulties faced by Isabel’s brother, Hendrik, as he assumes his gay identity in a world bounded by propriety and a furtive secretiveness. As Isabel and Eva begin to develop strong feelings for each other, in ways that surprise them both, they too are mindful of the need to conceal, the obligation to be aware of the wide gap between what is legal and what is tolerated. Van der Wouden brings a persuasive physical intensity to this burgeoning relationship, and much of her art lies in her ability to make sentences track the couple’s passion without losing their emotional incisiveness.
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Isabel’s discovery of Eva’s diary signals the end of one story – the Netherlands in peacetime – and the beginning of another: wartime the Netherlands. Eva de Haas, who is Jewish, logs the experiences of her family – murder, disappearance, dispossession – and one of those losses brings her back to the house Isabel’s family owns. Eva’s father was taken to the camps and unable to keep up his mortgage payments; the house was duly repossessed and purchased by Isabel’s Uncle Karel. The traumatic circumstances of the legalised theft of her childhood home lead Eva to plot her own revenge on the den Brave clan.
What unites the older members of Isabel’s family is feigned ignorance and perpetual dissembling. Isabel has to find her own ways of reckoning with Dutch complicity in Nazi crimes, since pretending not to have known and engaging in a form of competitive victimhood (”Where did anyone go, Isabel. It was war. It was hunger. We were starving. We were living on rations.”) mean that no one is ever held to account. She also has to push against the unspoken prejudices shadowing her own search for sexual liberation.
Not the least of the pleasures of The Safekeep are the portrayals of the minor characters. Johan, Isabel’s neighbour, has clear designs on her, and she concedes to one or two reluctant dates. His lumbering bonhomie and casual sense of entitlement are brilliantly caught by van der Wouden, as is the faint trace of menace behind his more buffoonish displays of cologne-scented affection.
Uncle Karel is the fastidiously mean relative who serves up tea made with leaves reused from the morning and who routinely “named several items that were considerably more expensive now than they were last time this year”. His cool self-preoccupation is artfully conveyed by the silences, breaks and sudden twists in his pinched conversation.
Hendrik’s partner, Sebastian, is an Algerian-born Frenchman, and the novel hints at the tragic complexities of his own upbringing while also, through Sebastian, offering the reader glimpses of casual forms of racism in Dutch society. Yael van de Wouden’s debut novel signals the arrival of a writer of very considerable talent who is in enviable control of the possibilities of the novel form.
The Safekeep is a beguiling love story told in a language that entertains and enthrals and that never lets the duty to the truth get in the way of the pleasure of the writing. Or of the reading.
