Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer's Reviews > The Safekeep

Longlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize.

I re-read this book following its long listing having first read it days before the longlist announcement as it was mentioned in some Booker speculation.

I was intrigued how this would work on a re-read given the “twist”

It actually worked well - I think because the book is more than the twist: Isabelle re-examining aspects of her life (the confrontations with Uncle Karel and Rian) and then the working out of her relationship with Eva. So knowing what was coming (which anyway I know different readers worked out at different times) did not really change the story.

And I did admire the author’s decision to have a positive ending. She has said of this:

“This is perhaps an unpopular opinion, but I think it’s so, so much more impressive when a hopeful ending is made to feel true, like a real possibility. It’s harder than making a sad ending feel true and possible—that’s life. That’s more or less my relationship to hope, I think. It’s hard work, but God, isn’t it impressive when it works?”

My favourite passage second time around

“What certainty can you give me? What home”
“This home” she said “My Home”
Eva shook her head “No you can’t: she said “It’s not yours to give”

Booker link: Hendrik’s falling out with his mother stems from an encounter with a predatory piano teacher - such a teacher also appears in a story the narrator of Stone Yard Devotional remembers from her childhood.

ORIGINAL REVIEW

The Hebrew scripture was inlaid in what once must have been a gold-painted stone but was now graying, dull. She stepped closer. In Roman letters, the quote announced itself: Isaiah, 56:7. Isabel drove back home. Her Bible she kept in her room, on her shelf. The little hare leaned its little back against it. Isabel found the quote. For my house will be called, she read, finger next to the number seven, a house of devotion for all.

The author was Tel Aviv born (and spent her early childhood there) before moving with her Israeli citizen mother and Dutch father to her father’s country where she now teaches.

This essay (https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articl...) gives a good background on her conflicted relationship with her heritage and with her adopted society.

The novel, set in the Eastern Netherlands in 1961, opens in and is dominated by the third party viewpoint of Isabel. Isabel, while not a practicing believer, is infused though with a Dutch Calvinistic sense of austerity, primness, and judgementalism and self-denial. She still lives, now alone, in the family home that she and her family (her mother – whose worldview seems to have permeated her own – and her 2 brothers moved into – from their Amsterdam home – in 1944 at the tail end of the war, when she was 11, her older brother Louis 13 and her younger brother Hendrik 11).

Now their mother dead the house is promised to Louis when he gets married – but with Louis something of a Lothario she assumes he will never settle down and increasingly sees the house as her own possession – obsessing over the housekeepers she employs and discards for some form of transgression – the book opening with her finding a shard of one of her mother’s favourite plates (Delft like with a hare design) and having to be talked down by the calmer Hendrik (who also tries to stop her habit of pinching her skin) from accusing the latest maid of breaking and hiding it. Hendrik left home some years back after a row with his mother about his homosexuality – and now lives with a mixed race male partner. Isabel seems determined to be a life long virgin – fending off the rather clumsy advances of her putative boyfriend.

The opening chapter – and the original seed for the novel in a creative working exercise – has the three siblings getting together with Louis bringing his latest girlfriend Eva to the condescension of Hendrick and the open hostility of Isabel – who is then horrified when Louis visits her only 12 days later saying that he has to go to a conference abroad and that Eva is to stay with her while he is away in the family home that she now thinks of as simply for her.

From there the book develops as the relationship between Isabel and the slightly mysterious but quietly fierce Eva (no known family) simmers – first of all into scarcely concealed animosity but then veering into sudden passion. Amusingly in the Acknowledgements she thanks her family for their respect in not talking to her about Chapter 10 – and I have to say that I was not really sure what to say about that Chapter in my review, so I will share their respectfulness.

But Isabel’s paranoia does not rescind – and she is convinced that her servant is gradually stealing some of her mother’s old possessions and keepsakes – and suspicious and unhappy at Eva’s befriending of the maid. And tension mounts as Louis’s return brings to a head her Isabel and Eva’s affair.

The book then takes a twist – although one I think most readers will have seen coming at some point (even if only a few pages earlier) with the novel then switching to (appropriately given the essay I referenced) a diary which brings everything into perspective.

But the twist is not the end of the story – as it’s the resolution of the revelations which really plays out in a strong closing section which I think makes the novel a success.

I felt that when reading it this novel was in a complex conversation with the Women’s Prize shortlisted, Aspen Words Literary Prize and RSL Encore Award winning novel “Enter Ghost” by Isabella Hammad – and particularly the verse which opens my review of that book.

And I particularly liked this quote from the author when asked about how the novel speaks to on-going events:

This is what the story is about. It’s about displacement, and it’s about the way that we think about ownership. Loving a place does not make us the owners of it. What I’m really afraid of is that people will read this and be like, “Naive Yael, thinking that we can all live in one house and only love could save us at the end of the day.” I know it’s not that simple. I know it’s not that, but it is what I wanted for these characters. Also because that’s the history of me. That’s the history of where I come from. And these are the two histories of displacement that I’ve, sort of, both lived through and had in my history. The story is about Isabel herself having to deal with complicity. I embody those two ends of the spectrum: both complicity on the one hand and, on the other hand, also a history of victimhood. Both of them are within me and that’s not even counting my Dutch grandmother, who was born in Indonesia and was part of a colonial system.
Within me, there’s all of that and all of that is also in this book.

Overall an extremely assured debut novel which starts as something of a gothic psychological novel, takes a turn into a highly charged erotic one, ends as a surprisingly positive love story but which is also at heart a powerful examination of the unspoken elements in post war Dutch society.