‘The Safekeep’ by Yael van der Wouden

I went into The Safekeep thinking I was getting a thriller. Set in the Netherlands in 1961, it follows Isabel, a woman living alone in her family home whose carefully ordered existence is disrupted when her brother’s new girlfriend, Eva, comes to stay. With suspicion and obsession bubbling away beneath the surface, it certainly seemed as though that was where the story was heading.

Isabel is stoic, dismissive and weary of almost everyone around her. She likes the house kept a certain way and her life seems governed by order and routine. Initially, I thought the novel was going to explore these tendencies and what happens when someone completely different is suddenly introduced into such a controlled environment. There was something compelling about watching Isabel become increasingly fixated on Eva and the disruption she represented.

What surprised me was just how much the novel transformed as it went on. It almost felt like three different stories in one. What begins as a tense exploration of suspicion and obsession gradually becomes a forbidden love story before eventually revealing itself as something much sadder, rooted in the aftermath of the Second World War. Because of that, I sometimes felt as though the novel did not quite know what it wanted to be, and the way it had been presented to me felt somewhat disconnected from what the story ultimately became.

The Safekeep was not quite the book I expected it to be, and I am still not entirely convinced all of its different identities fit seamlessly together.

Yael van der Wouden’s writing, however, is great. She creates a wonderfully uneasy atmosphere and makes the house feel unsettling even when very little is actually happening. I could picture both the setting and Isabel and Eva clearly. The supporting characters felt much less developed, but I suspect that was intentional. As the story progresses, the world seems to narrow around Isabel and Eva, allowing us to become increasingly consumed by their relationship in much the same way they become consumed by one another.

The revelation in the final third was genuinely satisfying and I did not anticipate the novel taking that particular turn. Maybe I am just dense, but it completely reframed much of what had come before. More importantly, it opened my eyes to another aspect of the aftermath of the Holocaust that I had rarely considered: that survival did not mean life simply returned to normal once the war was over. People survived unimaginable horrors only to return to a world where their homes, possessions and former lives could already belong to somebody else.

I did predict the ending, although I do not necessarily think that was a bad thing. After everything the novel reveals, there was something comforting about the small amount of narrative light it offered when the reality for so many people was so unbearably dark.

The Safekeep was not quite the book I expected it to be, and I am still not entirely convinced all of its different identities fit seamlessly together. But its atmosphere, writing and final revelation gave it far more weight than I initially expected, and it is one that became considerably more interesting to me the further I got from the story I thought I was reading.