Review of THE SAFEKEEP by Yael van der Wouden (New Release)

 3.5 Stars

Because of my husband’s Dutch heritage, I am attracted to books set in the Netherlands. This one certainly taught me something about post-war Netherlands which I did not know.

The novel is set in 1961. Isabel den Brave lives alone in what has been the family home since 1944. Hers is a lonely existence centred on the house. She is the house’s guardian; her days are devoted to maintaining its rooms, keeping its treasures clean, and tending its garden: “She belonged to the house in the sense that she had nothing else, no other life than the house.” Her tranquil, ordered life is disrupted when her elder brother Louis drops off his girlfriend Eva to stay for a month. Isabel is irate and treats Eva with cold contempt, especially when she comes to suspect that Eva is stealing items from the house. The tension impels Eva to confront her hostess and their relationship quickly changes to an obsessive infatuation. The newfound intimacy leads to a discovery which forces Isabel to question what she knows about her family and her home.

Isabel and Eva are foil characters. Isabel is tidy, organized and routine-driven. She thinks of friendship as distrustful and is judgmental, with definite prejudices against almost everyone outside her family. Her behaviour suggests an obsessive personality and her overreactions suggest she is emotionally repressed. Eva is the exact opposite. She is lazy and unkempt. She doesn’t respect boundaries. She accepts others and enjoys a good time, laughing easily and often.

Isabel very much experiences a journey of self-discovery. When she finally senses an attraction to Eva, she is very troubled. Isabel’s younger brother Hendrik is gay and has been living with a partner for years, but their mother never accepted her son’s sexuality. Though their mother is dead, Isabel still believes homosexuality is morally wrong. Isabel progresses from repressing and denying her feelings to eventually acknowledging and acting on them. She also learns the truth about the house and possessions to which she is so desperately attached.

The change in Isabel and Eva’s relationship does not come as a surprise. The paragraph describing Isabel’s eating of the pear given to her by Eva is so sensual that it clearly foreshadows. I noted that even the author refers to this scene in her Acknowledgments: “Thank you for St. Augustine and the pears. People can’t stop talking about the pears, they’re a great hit.” Anyone wondering about the book’s cover will understand once s/he has read this passage.

What did bother me is the sudden transformation in the nature of their relationship. The change from intense dislike to intense infatuation seems very abrupt. And then the second part of the novel has so many sex scenes that they become repetitive. The chemistry between the women seems both rushed and overdone, though I assume that Isabel’s obsessive personality is supposed to account for her obsessiveness in their relationship.

The other revelation about Isabel’s family and family home is also not a surprise. Because Isabel was a child in 1944, there is a vagueness about the family’s move into the home, but there are also clues in what she does remember. I’ve read enough articles about a situation that still appears in media stories so I predicted the truth early on, though I obviously didn’t know the details. The book has certainly inspired me to do some further research into post-war events in the Netherlands; I have a brother- and sister-in-law who live in Eindhoven which is mentioned in the book.

Parts I and III held my interest the most, though this will not be the case for all readers. I recommend it to readers interested in views about women’s sexuality and homosexuality in the early 1960s and on post-war life in the Netherlands. It is a well-written novel worth reading.

Note:  I received an eARC from the publisher via NetGalley.