The Safekeep Was the Most Elegantly Moving Book This Year

We get it—there is simply too much. So, as in years past, we are giving our editors a last-minute opportunity to plug the things that maybe got away. See all the things you really should have read, watched, or listened to—as well as more of our year in review coverage—here.

Even for those of us who read semi-professionally, there are the ones that got away. I pride myself on being the first port of call for friends, family, and members of my book club when it comes to recommendations. And yet! Do you recall that scene from David Lodge’s under-appreciated (though probably dated) campus novel Changing Places, where the characters—English faculty all—play a game in which they admit to the most famous book they haven’t read? The main character claims Hamlet…and then loses his job. We all have our blind spots.

This year, my literary blind spot wasn’t so obvious as the Bard’s best-known work; rather, it was a book that took me by surprise, until a handful of people I really trust recommended it to me. “It was the book I loved the most—that I didn’t represent,” a literary agent whispered recently at a holiday party. Is there a better endorsement?

The Safekeep by Yael Van Der Wouden tells the story of Isabel, who lives alone in the Dutch province of Overijssel in 1961. The house is quiet; Isabel exerts herself mainly in her garden and in consternation over whether the maid is stealing from her. Her parents are dead and her brothers, Hendrik and Louis, have fled their rural home for livelier urban settings. Henrik lives with his boyfriend, Sebastian, though no one, least of all Isabel, who maintains a maternal closeness to her younger brother, can admit the nature of his relationship. Louis is a philanderer, and it is his latest simultaneously casual and intense relationship that catalyzes the events of the book. “Louis usually brought girls to their dinners,” Van der Wouden writes, and in this instance he brings Eva, a bleached blonde woman in a badly made dress. “She was pretty in a way that men thought women ought to be pretty.”

Eva ends up moving into the house, installing herself in the room formerly occupied by the siblings’ now deceased mother. Louis has to travel, and there’s the sense that Eva has nowhere else to go—a vague rationale that feels at once inevitable and illogical. Isabel almost immediately develops an intense dislike for Eva, a disorderly presence who disrupts the strictly regimented life Isabel has built for herself. Eva says the wrong thing, leaves a mess, walks through the house with a lit cigarette. Isabel seethes, the intensity of her emotion quietly roiling.

All this forms the engrossing foreground of The Safekeep, but when I returned to the early chapters of this book, I was shocked by how much context I had neglected to fully appreciate the first time I read it. It is not Eva’s arrival that really kicks off the book, but the discovery of a broken piece of crockery in the garden. It belongs to the dead mother’s “good” set, which they never use, the shard a manifestation of the idea that something is about to rent the fabric of Isabel’s world.

“Who knows how the house was kept before we moved in,” Henrik says when Isabel presents him with the fragment. Before, Isabel wonders? She has all but banished the wartime memory of being evacuated to the empty but fully furnished house with her siblings as an 11-year-old. Their uncle had found it for them, and the children do not think twice about making it their own. When they discover a chest of toys in the attic, their uncle tells them it was left there by Saint Nicholas.

The Safekeep is in some ways hard to characterize. The author has said that the first book she fell in love with as a child was The Secret Garden, and there is a lot in this book that evokes the great manor house novels—Bleak House, Jane Eyre, Rebecca—the setting (and its ghosts) as much a character in the book as the people inhabiting it. It is a novel about mothers and daughters, and the struggles women faced to find a place in the postwar world especially, one in which history had been upended but expectations of propriety had paradoxically persisted. Isabel clings to the house and the structures she has imposed there because she has nothing else.

But it is also a surprising love story, and the most delicately powerful piece of historical fiction I have read in a long time. Most novels of World War II confront the horrors of that time head-on, as if to do less would dishonor the magnitude of the atrocity. This book makes the case that there is a subtler iniquity in the sins of forgetting, in papering over, in moving in and moving on. They are everyday, understandable sins, banal and piercing. They linger after the immediate aftermath has settled: the “chaos of the train stations, hollow-faced people wandering the streets on bare feet,” as Van der Wouden describes it. The Safekeep is a hard-edged book cloaked in elegance; like the shard in the garden that begins it all, it is both cutting and a thing of beauty.