The Safekeep

It’s a tricky thing for an author to let us hate his or her main characters. Yet somehow Yael Van Der Wouden opens her absolutely stunning debut novel The Safekeep by doing just that. The novel is told through eyes of Isabel, who strikes the reader as extremely paranoid, stodgy, and overall just plain rude. Which does not bode well for her when her brother dumps his girlfriend, Eva, on her for the summer at their family home. Seen through Isabel’s eyes, Eva is loud, uncouth, and particularly grating. I hated them both instantly. Yet by the end of the book I loved them so fiercely I would literally put myself between them and harm. It’s quite the feat.

The Safekeep is described as horror, mystery, erotica, literary, and just about everything in between. For me, I never felt the creeping dread or mystery that other readers report experiencing, but this is likely due to my particular family background. I understood where this was going from the first chapter. At the point when most of my fellow readers gasped in shock, I simply nodded in recognition. The only difference between me and Eva is that for my family you can replace the words “taxes” and “bureaucracy” with the names of various firearms. There are reasons I don’t visit certain countries despite them being locations my grandparents once lived. So I’m having a hard time placing this particular novel into a neat category, but I don’t have any difficulty describing it. It is magnificent. It is queer. It is full of longing, and also forgiveness. It is vicious, and it is gentle, and it will alter you forever. 

Part of what underscored the plot is the interplay of hate and desire. The things that I hated when I met Isabel and Eva were the things about them that I knew lived somewhere deeply within myself – Isabel’s hoarding tendencies, and social anxiety. Eva’s inability to get her manners right in upscale society. Those things are a part of me too. I’m too shy, too loud, too much, too Jewish, too formerly poor to ever feel like I fit in. I am all too familiar with how one can both hate and love themselves. What I recognized most in both of them though, was the desire that lurks in their hearts. For Isabel, she misreads her own desires as loathing, channels them into cherishing objects. When Eva presents her with an actual outlet for all that pent up longing it releases with all the pent up energy of a volcano erupting. For Eva, desire is more complicated. Without spoiling the entire plot, let’s just say when Eva thinks she desires possessions I suspect she actually wants the security they represent. Not just physically, she well knows that safety can be a transient thing, but emotionally. To be secure in the presence of the people she loves. To have her desire received and reciprocated. Essentially, to be wanted.

If you have had the fortune, (or misfortune as the case may be), to experience this kind of want you’ll know that no object can fulfill it. You options are limited. You can pray you find a person (or persons) that can make even a dent in that yawning chasm of desire. You can accept that the yearning will always be a part of you, smoldering below the surface, waiting for a chance to burn you whole. Or you can be like me and let it out by writing stories about Jewish girls kissing on spaceships while they low key dabble in mysticism. As a coping mechanism, it is adequate, but I can’t say I highly recommend it. 

In the end, the joke is on me for waiting all those months to read The Safekeep because my library hold took forever. Because the thing I want right now is a copy of the book, which I have indeed ordered, so that I can carry around with me like a security blanket in case I miraculously run into the author (who I think doesn’t even live on my continent?) so I can be too embarrassed to approach and get it singed anyway. I suggest you go read it, so that you too can be forever changed and forever wanting. 

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