As routinely as the changing of the seasons, every year, the Booker Prize — the leading literary award in the English-speaking world — is conferred to what is believed to be, in the judges’ views, the best sustained work of fiction written in English and published in the United Kingdom and Ireland.
This year, The Michigan Daily Book Review took it upon themselves to read and review the six novels shortlisted for this year’s Booker Prize. Although the overarching goal of delicately crafted literature has never been and will never be minimized to a mere award, contests such as the Booker Prize decide, time and again, who the up-and-coming authors of our time are and how they have rightfully claimed their place in the literary world. Our writers have devised detail-oriented reviews analyzing the literary artistry that lies behind each of these novels, deciding, in their own right, whether or not they merit their nomination. In a culminating article, our writers will come together to discuss which of the shortlisted stories they believe will be crowned winner in the end.
We hope you enjoy this edition of the series, and that we’ll see you again for the rest.
— Graciela Batlle Cestero, Senior Arts Editor, and Camille Nagy, Books Beat Editor
It starts with a piece of broken ceramic, found half-buried in the garden: a single shard from a set of plates, meant to be locked away except on special occasions. This discovery is the first crack in Isabel’s otherwise still, solitary life in the western portion of the Netherlands, where she lives alone in the country home her family fled to during World War II. This small fragment begins to throw the facts of her life into disarray, casting a new light on memories of a childhood in wartime — a dissonance that is made worse when her brother’s girlfriend Eva arrives for an unannounced, month-long stay.
Eva is everything Isabel despises: loud, girlish and oblivious or, rather, defiant of the quiet order of Isabel’s home. Yet, there’s something about Eva — a resonance between her and Isabel that is unspoken and unnameable — that pulls Isabel into her orbit, like a moth to a flame, transforming hatred into possessiveness and anger into desire. Her visit threatens to collapse Isabel’s neat, well-to-do world, kindling an obsession the likes of which Isabel has never known.
Yael van der Wouden’s debut, “The Safekeep,” is utterly enchanting, and certain to draw readers in from the first haunting paragraph to the very last word. Shortlisted for this year’s Booker Prize, it is a novel of singular lyricism and attention to language. Van der Wouden writes almost more like a poet than a novelist, with intentional word choice that grants her story a beguiling beauty and tension. There is a powerful allure to the way she writes — an effortlessness to her bridging of Dutch and English, a current of the erotic (in its deepest sense) in each tense engagement between Isabel and Eva and a tenderness in her approach to her flawed, hurting heroines.
It is, notably, a masterful take on the literary Queer romance. There’s a sorrow to the book — dealing with Queerness in the early ’60s and the aftermath of a war and genocide that framed Eva and Isabel’s formative years — that never bows down to hopelessness. Drenched in the beauty of the Dutch countryside and the blossoming attraction between the two women, it is a romance that both women refuse to name, an affair they lack the language to understand. They dance around it at first, reluctant to acknowledge the depth of the strange bond between them or even its existence. Later, unable to deny the heat of the stolen glances and the fleeting touches, it is something they communicate solely through their bodies, each embrace a commitment. This narrative is as old as Queer literature — found in the hallowed halls of the Library of Congress and the Archive of Our Own — one given arresting shape and form. While van der Wouden may walk what is now a well-trodden path (the comparisons to James Baldwin’s “Giovanni’s Room” and “Another Country” write themselves), she brings a new life and clarity of vision with her.
Van der Wouden is openly conversant with these Queer ancestors and leverages the historical setting of the novel to explore the tenuous connections in Isabel’s otherwise solitary life. “The Safekeep” is as much a novel about siblings and the relationships between lesbians and gay men as it is about romance. Isabel’s brother, Hendrik, and his partner are the only other gay characters in the entire novel. Where Isabel and Eva have a furtive, desperate affair, Hendrik and Sebastian’s life is more settled and domestic, though the culture of the time limits their openness. The tensions between Isabel and Hendrik fuel much of the novel — she refuses to let him entirely into her life, resenting him for running away as a teenager and leaving her alone with their ailing mother. Hendrik, for his part, pays little attention to the enforced gender roles that limit her autonomy as an unmarried woman. But as Isabel’s relationship with Eva swells, the siblings’ shared otherness also forms an unmistakable, if fragile, bond between them.
Ultimately, however, “The Safekeep” is about Jewish heritage and the fraught return home faced by many Holocaust survivors. It’s a part of the book that is difficult to discuss without giving it away, so I won’t be able to afford it much space in this review. Know that van der Wouden explores the limits of national and personal memory, as well as the gap between the acknowledgment of a tragedy and the accountability for its aftermath, with grace and sweeping clarity. It will be best enjoyed, I imagine, when read with as little outside context as possible. It will be well worth it.
“The Safekeep” explores womanhood and trauma with a keen eye, its characters navigating a delicious border between possessiveness and love. For fans of angsty lesbian romance — or just good literature — it’s certainly a must-read.
Daily Arts Writer Alex Hetzler can be reached at alexhetz@umich.edu.
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