The Safekeep, Yael van der Wouden’s debut novel, is about in 1961 rural Holland. At 30, Isabel resides in the home the place she was raised after the demise of her father compelled the household’s transfer from the town and right into a furnished home their uncle Karel discovered for them. Isabel lives a circumscribed and watchful life, guarding her useless mom’s issues, suspecting the maid of theft and heading off the attentions of a flirtatious neighbor. Of her brothers, Louis and Hendrik, she is nearer to Hendrik, though she disapproves of his good friend Sebastian, suspecting a deeper connection. Of Louis and the regular stream of girlfriends he introduces to her, she thinks even much less. Till Eva.
The siblings meet Eva at a dinner out. Along with her clumsy manners and brassy dyed hair, she hardly impresses, and Isabel is shocked when Louis brings her to the home, telling Isabel that Eva should keep there whereas he goes away on enterprise and displaying Eva to their mom’s room. Even beneath Isabel’s watchful eye, issues start to vanish—a spoon, a bowl, a thimble. Extra alarming to Isabel is the overwhelming attraction she feels to Eva, an attraction that spills into an obsessive, intensely depicted sexual relationship.
Van der Wouden could also be acquainted because the writer of the 2017 essay “On (Not) Studying Anne Frank,” which explored what it means to be a Dutch Jewish author and her sophisticated relationship to Frank’s legacy. As Isabel and Eva’s connection unfolds, Van der Wouden’s true topic comes into view: how strange folks had been implicated within the ethnic cleaning that passed off throughout World Warfare II. Even in peacetime, Isabel and her friends are fast to note individuals who seem completely different, with a fierce disgust that Isabel dangers turning on herself as she involves phrases together with her sexuality. A novel of redemption as a lot as revenge, The Safekeep has the pacing and twists of a thriller, whereas delving into the deeper points laid naked by the Holocaust.