Yael van der Wouden’s Safekeep at the book club

Yael van der Wouden, The Safekeep (Viking 2024)

Before the meeting: As I mentioned in my post about Lai Wen’s Tiananmen Square, this book has a general strategy in common with a number of other books I’ve read recently – a personal relationship as way of drawing the reader into a big public event.

In this case the personal relationship is sexual. At times I felt like averting my eyes, as if I was intruding on intensely intimate moments.

The book is told from the point of view of a woman who lives alone in the house she has kind-of inherited from her parents in postwar Netherlands. Her brother actually owns of the house but lets her live in it. The story kicks off when he pressures her to allow his girlfriend to stay with her while he goes away for work. The two women are very prickly with each other at first: the owner is prim and obsessive about neatness, and her begrudged guest is an apparently easygoing woman of the world. Bit by bit we realise that the narrator is constantly aware of the other woman’s bodily presence, and eventually the dam breaks and there are many pages of enthusiastic sex.

There are hints along the way that something else is going on. In the book’s very first paragraph, for instance, the uptight host finds a ceramic shard buried in the cottage garden. She recognises a piece from her mother’s precious dinner set, but has no memory of any of those plates ever having been broken. This is the first of a number of hints that there is something about the house that has never been acknowledged. More telling perhaps are childhood memories of strangers knocking at the door and her mother ignoring them.

I guess I knew from the beginning roughty where things were going, and even during the scenes of passion I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. It does drop, most satisfactorily.

I loved this book.

After the meeting: I wasn’t alone in loving it.

This book group, the majority of whose members are Lesbian, has long had a rule that no Lesbian books were allowed unless the Lesbianism was incidental to the plot. Well, this book smashed that rule to bits, but it did it with such grace and integrity and good writing that not even the Chief Rulemaker minded.

Though we all loved the book, we spent some time discussing the ending. Was it too neat, too quickly achieved, too much out of character? It’s hard to blog about endings but I don’t think I’m giving too much away if I say that two possibilities were raised in defence: first, it’s like the endings to Shakespeare’s comedies – you’re not meant to think this could really have happened but it’s satisfying to imagine it as a kind of justice; second, the apparent change of personality involved could be accounted for by the transformative power of the passionate sexual experience – certainly it was transformative, and maybe even more so than obvious. If you’ve read the book, you’ll have opinions of your own.

The Book Club met on Gadigal land, and I wrote the blog post on land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation, land that has never been ceded. I acknowledge the Elders past and present who have cared for this land for millennia.