The Safekeep

An Ordered Life

Isabel lives alone. Her apartment is immaculate: each object in its place, each surface clean, each visitor subject to unspoken protocols about where to stand and what not to touch. She has made an interior world of perfect order, and she moves through it with the satisfaction of someone whose domestic environment is an extension of a self that has similarly been arranged to prevent disturbance.

When her brother arrives with his girlfriend Isabelle — vivacious, careless, physically present in ways that Isabel is not — the disturbance begins. Objects are moved. Surfaces are touched. The girlfriend leaves rings from coffee cups and thinks nothing of it. Isabel thinks of almost nothing else.

Yael van der Wouden’s debut novel, shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize, uses this setup — formally close to psychological thriller, emotionally close to erotic fiction, tonally close to the Dutch literary realism of the mid-twentieth century it is set in — to approach a subject that the novel’s first-person narrator is determined not to approach directly: the provenance of the objects in Dutch homes in the decades after World War II.

The Historical Dimension

It takes time for The Safekeep to reveal what it is actually about. The first half of the novel is the story of Isabel’s discomfort, her obsessive attention to her possessions, her complicated response to Isabelle. It is formally precise and somewhat uncomfortable to inhabit — Isabel’s voice has a quality of control that creates friction with the reader as well as with the other characters.

The revelation is gradual and devastating. The objects in Isabel’s apartment — the silver candlesticks, the small paintings, the decorative pieces that she inherited and values and protects — have histories that she has not examined. In the Netherlands in the 1940s, Jewish families were deported; their homes were emptied; their possessions were redistributed, sold, or absorbed into the households of Dutch families who either participated in the looting or benefited from it without asking where things came from.

This is not a history that the Dutch have been eager to acknowledge. The official narrative of the Netherlands in World War II — a nation of resistors, of people who hid Jews, of those who suffered under occupation — coexisted for decades with a systematic silence about the degree to which ordinary Dutch households benefited materially from the deportation of Jewish neighbours.

Isabel as Narrator

Isabel’s fastidiousness, initially read as character trait or neurosis, gradually reveals itself as something more specific and more troubling: it is a mode of not-knowing. Her obsessive attention to the surface of things — their cleanliness, their arrangement, their possession — is a way of not attending to the histories of those things. She has constructed an interior world that requires its objects to have no past, only a present in which they belong to her.

Isabelle’s arrival disturbs this not only by creating physical disorder but by introducing a person who, Isabelle eventually reveals, does have a claim on some of these objects. The specific nature of that claim — the specific history of how certain items came to be in Isabel’s apartment — is the novel’s historical revelation, and it is handled with a control that mirrors Isabel’s own: gradual, precisely timed, withheld until exactly the right moment.

The Erotic Dimension

The relationship between Isabel and Isabelle — Isabel’s attraction to her brother’s girlfriend, Isabelle’s complicated response to that attraction — is not incidental to the novel’s historical concerns but integral to them. Desire, like historical knowledge, is something Isabel has constructed her life to avoid. Both disturb the controlled surface. Both threaten the order she has maintained.

Van der Wouden does not use the erotic as metaphor for the historical, exactly — the relationship between the two dimensions is more complicated than substitution. The novel is about desire and it is about historical reckoning, and the two are brought into proximity in ways that illuminate each other without collapsing into allegory.

Dutch Literary Precision

The Safekeep has the formal qualities associated with the best Dutch literary fiction: economy, precision, a preference for the oblique approach to difficult subjects, a distrust of sentimentality. These are qualities that suit the material exactly — the Dutch silence about wartime looting is itself characterised by surface respectability and a systematic avoidance of direct confrontation.

The novel’s refusal to be more comfortable than its subject demands is itself a kind of moral honesty. It does not resolve the historical question; it does not provide Isabel with a trajectory of reckoning and redemption that would make the reader feel better. It leaves the disturbance unresolved, which is the accurate position.

Our rating: 4.5/5 — Formally extraordinary and morally serious. A debut of rare precision and ambition.