The Safekeep

Yael van der Wouden

This reading group guide for The Safekeep includes an introduction, discussion questions, ideas for enhancing your book club, and a Q&A with author Yael van der Wouden. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.

Introduction

In the Dutch countryside, sixteen years after the end of World War II, Isabel finds her solitary life in her deceased mother’s home suddenly interrupted by an extended visit from Eva, Isabel’s brother’s girlfriend. Eva and Isabel could not be more dissimilar—Isabel is quiet and serious, and Eva is giggly and perhaps not so bright. But there is much more than what lies on the surface. Over the summer, Isabel and Eva’s relationship drastically changes as they both confront past secrets, present desires, and whether to let go of something precious that they have long claimed as their own. This sexy, suspenseful, whip-smart novel explores in breathtaking prose the legacy of trauma, the many facets of revenge, and the unexpected layers of history to which a single home may bear witness.

Discussion Questions

1. What is the significance of the opening scene, especially if you consider how Eva’s last name can be translated to mean “hare”?

2. Compare the cover art of the U.S. hardcover and U.S. paperback editions. How do they communicate similar sentiments and themes that are present in the book?

3. In what ways is the house itself a character?

4. Isabel’s feelings toward Eva evolve from repulsion, to infatuation, to tenderness over the course of the novel. Before their first kiss, what scenes built tension and hinted at Isabel’s growing desire?

5. How are Isabel’s fear of abandonment and loss and Eva’s experience of losing everything juxtaposed through the course of the story?

6. How do the different sides of Eva—performative, private, genuine—contribute to the book’s psychological suspense?

7. Upon Hendrik’s impending return, Eva says to Isabel, “This is all there is, Isabel. This is all we have. We should make peace with that, yes?” Do you think this attitude toward scarcity is applied to other scenarios Eva and/or Isabel face?

8. What did Neelke help you to understand about Isabel that you might otherwise have missed?

9. How is Uncle Karl’s appearance toward the end of the book significant?

10. Take a moment to discuss the pacing of the novel. What literary devices did the author employ that contributed to the ebb and flow of tension?

11. Look up and read Isaiah 56:7, the verse referenced at the end of the book. What about the story do you see mirrored in this verse?

12. Do you believe The Safekeep is a hopeful book? Why or why not?

Enhance Your Book Club

1. Make a list of books about war and the aftermath of war that you and other individuals in your book club have read. How does The Safekeep compare to these books? How is it unique? Discuss.

2. Write one short story or essay that focuses on a specific home item you grew up with. Are you surprised by any of the emotions that arise when exploring this object in writing? Discuss with the group.

3. As a group, look at photos of countryside Dutch homes and discuss which photos most resemble the house from The Safekeep as you imagined it. How do the homes and settings you each imagine compare, and how do they differ? Discuss.

Questions for the Author

1. The setting, particularly the house, is incredibly important to the story. How did you conceive of such a home in the countryside, with secrets and relics? Was there any real-life place that served as inspiration?

There’s such a rich legacy of countryside homes with secret and relics! The entire gothic genre is basically young women who are sent to country homes and find secrets that then lead to some torrid love affair. It just so happens that this novel was written from the perspective of the gloomy, rugged love interest—although, perhaps “rugged” is not the best word to describe Isabel. The house in the novel took me a while to construct, actually! I ended up basing the aesthetics of it off a place I stayed at one holiday, but the preciousness of the household itself I think was more inspired by my own relationships to homes, and how often as a child I was reprimanded for touching things that I wasn’t supposed to touch . . .

2. What or who was the inspiration for Isabel and Eva?

Isabel had been on my mind for a while. Or at least, someone like Isabel: repressed and full of desire that she herself doesn’t understand. There’s nothing like the abandon of release that comes from a character whose only goal in life is to suppress. There’s such a catharsis in reading and writing a person like that! Eva came into existence in opposition to Isabel. I tried to construct someone who seemed to have been built purely to aggravate Isabel. She hates disorder, so Eva is disorderly. She hates bad manners, so Eva has no manners. The trick is, of course, to take that repulsion and subvert it into desire.

3. Was there anything about the Netherlands that you wanted to convey through this story?

Conveying, I think, implies that I was writing this novel for people who weren’t Dutch—and that isn’t necessarily the case. I also wasn’t writing it for the Dutch. I was passing the Dutch culture through both my own lens, which is a lens of questioning—why only one biscuit per person? Why always say what you think, and yet never say anything of true emotional value?—and Isabel’s lens, which is one of comfort and romance. She looks at the Dutch landscape and sees the romance of it, of the flat lands, of the fields and trees and water. She offers one biscuit, because anything more would be in excess. There’s comfort for her in those rules. My point of interest was: how many of these conventions can I disrupt for her? And indeed, by the end of the novel, the one biscuit is something she notices; the synagogue, which she had never seen before, is something she notices. It’s less about conveying a culture, and more about questioning what is malleable in a person, and what is static.

4. What are the keys to writing such hot, convincing, enthralling sex scenes?

You’re very kind in implying I managed as much! In my eyes, what makes for a good sex scene happens on several levels. First of all: you have to be serious about it. Utterly serious. No irony, no sarcasm, no leaning into the ugliness of the bodily because ugly language is easier to dismiss than earnest language. Second: play with high and low definition, by which I mean—pretend there’s a curtain wafting before the camera of your perspective, as a narrator. Sometimes you see something, sometimes you don’t. It’s that texture that creates thrill, that makes us lean in. Third: disgust. Not ugliness! But disgust. Intersperse softness and ease with a word that will make the reader buck: wet, fuck, covered in—you get the gist.

5. In the latter half of the book, you reveal Eva’s interior through her diary. How did you make such an abrupt tonal shift so gracefully?

Ah, I’m glad it came across as graceful! In fact, I couldn’t wait to get to the diary chapter. It was very restrictive, writing in Isabel’s perspective, which is very narrow and not internal and she never finishes a thought. To then get to spend some time with Eva, who is funny and a little mean and absolutely full of rage, was truly a relief. It was her connection to her own emotion and own history that felt like taking off a straitjacket.

6. Was there a particular character that challenged you most as a writer?

I was really very careful in how I wrote Hendrik and Sebastian, and rewrote most of the scenes that have them in it. There’s something precarious about the relationship between Isabel and Hendrik that took me a while to figure out: why does he go along with her meanness? How does he feel about her living in that house? Does he feel guilt, or frustration, or resentment toward her? And what’s Isabel’s relationship to Sebastian, who she sees as yet another outsider who’s come to take her family from her—does she feel any love toward him, and what’s the shape of that love? And what’s his view of her, this repressed, sour woman who expects so much and gives so little? It took a few rewrites to get it right, but it was so, so valuable; I understood the story so much better once I understood the relationship between those three.

7. What would you say to someone who wants to write a psychologically suspenseful story but isn’t sure how to get the pacing right?

Plot! Plot in advance, plot extensively, outline as much as you can. Outline scenes, outline dialogue, anything you can already see before you. Then reduce. Can you tell yourself the plot of the story in three sentences? Can you explain the premise in one? Once you have all of that, once you’ve arranged all the puppets and know where they’re going, the only thing left for you to do is write. And when you write without having to think about the plot, what happens is: all there is to focus on is the suspense on the page, the tension in the language. That’s number one. Number two is: let people read it, and edit. I went through seven drafts before I sent out the novel. Editorial work is where the magic happens, I promise!

8. What novels have most inspired you as a writer?

So hard to say! Most novels have inspired me, even the bad ones. Especially the bad ones. The bad ones make you understand what you want from a novel, and what you don’t want. A big formative novel for me was E. M. Forster’s Maurice. Another one was Carmen Maria Machado’s collection of short stories, Her Body and Other Parties. Sarah Waters, of course, a huge influence. Somewhere between those three I think a seed was planted for what ended up being my own novel.

9. You include a verse of scripture, Isaiah 56:7, at the end of the book. Why was it important to you to end on this note? And during what stage of writing this book did you think to include such a fitting reference?

It’s the actual quote that you can find on the actual synagogue in Zwolle! I grew up there, and that’s the shul I went to as a kid. I’d read it many times, over the years, but never really sat with it until I had to have Isabel look it up and sit with it. I wanted to end the novel on the notion of devotion, and the notion of “house,” because those are the two driving forces of the novel: both the women’s devotion to the house, and how they find each other in that shared devotion—different in its nature though it may be.

10. What did you learn about yourself and about the act of writing a novel from writing The Safekeep?

That I can write just about anywhere. Most of the novel I typed during my morning commute to work, a two-hour train journey to the south of the country where I was teaching at the time. I wrote in all sorts of spaces: in waiting rooms and on staircases and in cafés. It was a real thrill to find that if I needed to write, and really, truly needed to, I could block out just about anything in order to get it done.

• Publisher: Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster (May 28, 2024)
• Length: 272 pages
• ISBN13: 9781668034361