Isabel is digging in her garden when she finds a broken shard of ceramic. It “nicked through her glove, pierced a little hole”. She washes it and discovers “blue flowers along the inch of a rim, the suggestion of a hare’s leg” — it’s a plate from her mother’s favourite china set. But when did the plate break and why is it in the ground? And now she thinks of it, why were there only ever five plates, not six? Why, when they first moved into the family home, was there already “a chest of toys in the attic”?
In The Safekeep, Yael van der Wouden’s razor-sharp, perfectly plotted debut novel, history always comes back to nick you. The 37-year-old writer and teacher was born in Tel Aviv, Israel, but moved to the Netherlands at the age of ten. The day her family arrived she spotted a swastika spray-painted on a barn, an ominous sign of the years of antisemitic bullying she was to face and which she wrote about in heressay, On (Not) Reading Anne Frank. It’s well worth a read.
The Safekeep takes us back to the Netherlands in 1961, when people were still haunted by the Second World War, still found “bullet holes in the barks of trees”, still remembered (but did not speak of) the neighbours who had left in the night or been bundled into trains and off to “the camps”.
Isabel was a child during the war, but now she is nearly 30 and alone. Her mother is dead, her brothers, Louis and Hendrik, left the family home long ago. Isabel remains there, a strange, antisocial creature whose principal motivation is to keep everything in the home safe, inventoried and pristine.
Her fragile sense of control is shattered when she meets Eva, the new girlfriend of her playboy brother Louis, and discovers that Eva is to move in with her for a month while Louis works abroad. Eva, with her “violently peroxided bob” and “badly made dress” is an affront to insular Isabel, “[taking] up space with a loud restlessness” and asking awkward questions about the provenance of vases, paintings and toys. Worse than her energy and chattiness, though, is the feeling that Isabel is missing something crucial about Eva: sometimes she catches a “flash of something in her expression — a fissure”.
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But behind Isabel’s anger is a simmeringsexual passion, one that she has never felt for anyone else. Before now, arousal has been merely an “inconvenience”. “It was a heavy blanket weighing her down in the night, it was the drag of honey into lungs”, Van der Wouden describes in her luscious prose.
Inconvenience no longer, the pair begin a frantic, furtive love affair. Van der Wouden takes the risk, all the more impressive in a debut, of writing about sex without retreating into humour — and it pays off. The scenes feel real because they lean into the strangeness of exploring an alien body. Isabel listens to “the sound of her fingers inside Eva — the wet ticking of it, like the rolling of a hard candy in a mouth”. Genitals become poetic, almost disembodied: “Wet had pearled in her thatch of curls.” The pair have sex again and again, each time described in detail, seriously.
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Then comes a brilliantly executed twist that elevates the novel from a beautifully written lesbian romance to a shockingunmasking of the legacy of the Holocaust. Anything more and I’ll spoil it, so I’ll just say this: this book is worth your time and your patience. Van der Wouden has achieved something significant in The Safekeep, unearthing deeply buried pain and transforming it into a thrilling story. It’s even better on a second read: you’ll find more of those shards — unseen connections, hidden clues — which nick the skin and lodge in your mind.
The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden (Viking, £16.99, pp272). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
