Reading the Booker Prize - The Safekeep
I haven't made much of a dent into the Booker longlist yet, but of the books I've read so far this is by far my favourite and it's a strong contender for the best book I've read this year.
I had no idea what to expect going into this, and I think that lack of knowledge of the subject matter made it hit even harder. For the first 60% of the novel I was fully wrapped up in Isabella's burgeoning romance with Eva, her brother's lover who she is immediatelty inclined to dislike before slowly getting to know her - and, through their relationship, getting to know more about herself.
Isabella is an incredibly complex character who is beautifully realised on the page. We're not initially inclined to like her, and van der Wouden makes absolutely no attempt to convince us that we should. She's rude, abrasive, and dismissive of people. She's immediately judgemental of Eva, and thinks the worst of both her and her housemaid, Neelke. She lives alone in her mother's house, surrounded by her mother's things, a guest of her family, owning nothing of her own and with nobody in her life. She is, it seems, miserable, and it's a misery largely of her own making.
The romance here is one of the most natural I've ever read. It builds slowly, the erotic tension building slowly but steadily. And when it finally bubbles over, in a series of increasingly explicit sex scenes, it's rendered just as frankly and honestly as Isabella's unpleasant character was at the beginning of the book.
Yael van der Woulden's writing is stunning, the language some of the most understated and naturalistic I've read in a long time. Characters talk over each other, express partial thougths in fragments, break off mid-sentence and never pick up their thread again, but there's never any meaning lost and it never feels like someone trying to be "literary". The voice her is as authentic as the actions it's describing, and it's a joy to read.
At the heart of the book lies a simmering mystery about who Eva is and where she came from. It's alluded at from time to time, always there just beneath the surface. It's hard to talk about it without spoiling anything, but when the reveal finally came I wasn't at all ready for it and it hit like a gut punch. I suspect that many readers more knowledgeable than me about this time period would have picked up on it before being told, and I'm curious to know how this aspect of the book landed for them, but for me it elevated what was already a fantastic work to entirely new levels.
The fact that this is a debut is astonishing.
This blog doesn't have a comments section, by design. If you want to chat about any of the posts here, drop me an email at chris @ loottheroom dot uk.