The Safekeep
By Yael van der Wouden
Penguin, 272 pages

Yael van der Wouden’s debut novel ‘The Safekeep’, short-listed for the Booker Prize last year, has won the Women’s Prize for Fiction. Initial reviews in international press last year were full of praise for the novel, but spoke about its contents in such a way that this reader had put it on the to-be-read list, which gets added to by day and one never gets back to it. Penguin bringing an Indian edition provided a second chance, and it turned out to be an exhilarating reading experience. 

The novel has three sections: in the first the characters and their relationships are introduced, and the second features an unlikely romance of sorts. What would you expect from that? What the finale offers is completely out of the blue – and yet, in retrospect, it is there right from the opening lines. 

“There can be no poetry after Auschwitz.” It’s a well-known quote by Theodor Adorno. The two protagonists of ‘The Scrapbook”, a novel by Heather Clark published this year, discuss what the German philosopher meant to say. But, of course, literature continues and continues to grapple with the atrocities of the Holocaust – an unprecedented event in modern history. ‘The Scapbook’, a fine novel, is in the long line of novels taking an unflinching look at that painful episode in history. ‘The Safekeep’ approaches it tangentially.

That requires a carefully plotted narrative, and this is the strongest part of this novel. After a long detour when the vista finally opens up, we gasp, we are stunned. To keep that experience intact for the next reader, it is necessary for a review to refrain from offering a synopsis that gives away too much. Still, this much should suffice to set the scene:

The Netherlands, 1961. It’s 15 years since World War II and the rural province of Overijssel is quiet. Bomb craters have been filled, buildings reconstructed, and the conflict is history. Isabel, in her late twenties, lives alone in her late mother’s country home. She is in regular touch with her two brothers who work and live in the city. One of them is going abroad for a short while, and his latest girlfriend, Eva, needs a place to stay. Her choice is that country home, with Isabel. During a family dinner meeting earlier, the two of them had not started off on the best of terms, and living together in the vast building in the countryside is not going to be easy for either of them. Eva’s awkward behaviour and lack of social skills adds to the trouble. 

How the two form a working relationship, as it were, in this house forms section two and the last section must be read in the original.

The prose sometimes seems uneven like a less than satisfactory translation, but, as the TLS review has noted, the language here has its own elegance. That tone is well chosen to serve the narrative purpose here. At about 250 pages, it does not waste a word and the narrative including all apparent digressions tells a spellbinding story. As the early decades of the twenty-first century appear to be repeating the early decades of the previous one, ‘The Safekeep’ is an indispensable reading.