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.

Review

Avid Reader

“The Safekeep”

By Yael van der Wouden

Avid Reader. 262 pages.

$28.99

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.

The summer of 1961 will change Isabel’s life, in ways that seem impossible when Van der Wouden introduces her. Isabel, who is almost 30, is so rigid and tightly wound, so resistant to any interest beyond maintaining her pristine home – where she lives alone, barring occasional visits from her two city-dwelling brothers – that she seems incapable of change. On the very first page of the book, her younger brother, Hendrik, chides her for keeping all the “good things” in the house stored behind glass: “They are not for touching,” she says. “They are for keeping.”

Then, Isabel’s older brother, Louis, introduces his new girlfriend, Eva. Louis, only a few years older than Isabel, is frustratingly predictable, always in love with someone new; his siblings know that the relationship is unlikely to last. Yet somehow, after a first meeting in which Eva’s awkward charm provokes Isabel’s scorn, Isabel finds herself hosting Eva for a month during which Louis will be working abroad. This is not Isabel’s choice: The precious house is owned not by her but rather by an uncle who has willed it to Louis. Isabel lives there through the grace of their indifference. On her own, she would have nothing.

Eva’s mode of living is directly counter to Isabel’s. She is overtly sexual, in a messy way: Her lipstick is never on quite right, her clothes never fit as they should. She touches things she shouldn’t. She invites the teenage maid, whom Isabel has coldly bullied into a state of perpetual terror, to stay for a drink after work.

The first of the three acts that make up “The Safekeep” reads like the prologue to a horror movie. As Isabel’s fury – if that’s what it can be called; she herself doesn’t seem sure – at Eva’s presence builds, it gains a frightening power, the more so as she represses it. It must find release. And it does.

What Isabel doesn’t bother to ask, as the friction created by Eva’s nearness overtakes her consciousness: Who is this woman, really? Where did she come from? What does she want?

The answers to those questions, arriving late in the novel, are what eventually force Isabel to examine her own life. They are not entirely unpredictable; I guessed at the book’s most significant plot twist early on, and I suspect I’m not alone. It doesn’t matter. That twist is not what makes “The Safekeep” remarkable; what does is the extraordinary, emotional story Van der Wouden crafts around it, and the pitch-perfect voice she brings to the characters who experience its consequences.

She is exploring not just what living through an atrocity will do to a person, but what living in general will, too. At the beginning of the story, all her characters define themselves by surviving in the wake of something: Their existence is still delimited by the circumstances they have escaped. But then they are surprised; something shakes them out of their habitual modes. Some while into her month in the country, Eva asks, “Does nothing bring you joy, Isabel?” In trying to answer, Isabel spirals: Joy is so foreign a concept that she cannot even imagine what it might feel like. But her discomfort forces her into more intimacy with herself. Eventually, she forgets to think about her emotions before she can feel them. She begins to just experience.

With experience comes knowledge; with knowledge, a way forward. This process is a reminder that there are always good things to be touched in the world and that even those who have survived the worst can find them. “This is all there is, Isabel,” Eva says. “This is all we have. We should make peace with that, yes?”

Talya Zax is an editor at the Forward.