Booker finalist ‘The Safekeep’ is a moving look at history’s horrors

Yael van der Wouden’s novel, shortlisted for this year’s Booker Prize, is about a Dutch woman in 1961 forced to address her family’s past.

By Talya Zax

Isabel dislikes intimacy, and she likes order. She has invested her entire being in memory, but her memory fails her. It is 1961 in the Dutch countryside, where she has devoted her life to keeping her mother’s house intact, avoiding sharing a space with anyone too closely or for too long and not thinking about the horrors she survived — or ignored — in that very home.

Yael van der Wouden’s “The Safekeep,” shortlisted for this year’s Booker Prize, is a novel about opening — the opening of a home, then a heart and then, most painfully, awareness. And it will probably open you, too: It is the only book I have read this year that has made me cry.

In telling the story of Isabel, her family and the secrets they have lived with — sometimes unconsciously — Van der Wouden has produced the rare novel about World War II, the Holocaust and their aftermath that succeeds in feeling fully, intimately human. It does not try to encapsulate the incalculable suffering of millions, and it is not interested in making its readers suffer for the sake of suffering. It is just the story of a few lives, and of the localized devastation that visited them. Read the full review at the Washington Post.