Tag Archives: The Safekeep

Ratings and Scattered Thoughts: 3 Books Longlisted for the Women’s Prize

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Do you enjoy star ratings? Here are a few scattered thoughts on three longlisted novels for the Women’s Prize, along with my star ratings – the most fun bit.

Miranda July’s lively comic novel, All Fours, was on every “Best of” list at the end of 2024. Yes, the first part is very funny.  The narrator, a bisexual artist, decides to drive cross-country from L.A. to New York after her husband calls her a parker, not a driver.  But it turns out she is a parker:  she checks into a motel after 30 minutes on the road and pays $20,000 to have her room redecorated. After that, it’s basically a lot of sexual performance art:  steamy pining for a younger married man who works at Hertz Car Rental, which involves dancing and almost-sex; and sex with various women, including his first lover. There are way too many sex scenes, but I much enjoyed the last part of the book: the narrator finally concentrates on her changing relationship with her husband, her relationships with women (she is bisexual), and how to keep the family intact for her beloved child, Sam, who was born dead and resuscitated by a doctor.

How many stars do I give All Fours?  Four and one fourth!

Laila Lalami’s The Dream Hotel is compelling and nightmarish.  The Algorithm, a terrifying AI, mines dreams and internet data to predict crime.  Sara, an archivist who lives with her husband and twins, has no criminal history, and has never given a thought to the Risk Assessment Administration.  Then she is yanked out of line at an airport and sentenced to a Retention Center. The Algorithm decided that she is likely to murder her husband.

Lalami’s muted, elegant style underlines the surreal horror of the situation. Racial profiling is also an issue;  Sara is Moroccan-American. 

How many stars do I give The Dream Hotel? Four and a half!

I read Yael van der Wouden’s The Safekeep last year when it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. I dismissed it as a beach read.    Isabel, the possibly Aspergers heroine, lives in the elegant house where she grew up, and suspects her brother’s girlfriend of stealing a spoon during her month-long stay. There is a neat twist at the end of the novel, which raises questions of ownership and relationships. But, no, I did not like it.

How many stars do I give The Safekeep? Let’s call it three!

Are You High?  The Beach Read as Booker Prize Nominee

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“Are you high?” I was having an imaginary conversation with the 2024 Booker Prize judges.  That’s because I was unimpressed with The Safekeep, a nominee.

Every year the judges are given a mountain of books, this year 156, to skim, scan, peruse, and, whenever possible, actually read.  The Booker Prize judges are committed to positive thinking, or they would not be on the panel.  They will not say an interview, “What a shit-load of bad books!” 

And so it begins.  The brave Booker judges launch their list.

And then I read one of them.

After finishing The Safekeep, a first novel by a Dutch writer, Yael van der Wouden, I wrote in my book journal, “It is barely literary fiction.”  Let me elaborate:  it is NOT literary fiction.  It is pop fiction.

The plot is simple. There is a mystery surrounding Uncle Karel’s country house.  It is 1962, and the strange, possibly Aspergers heroine, Isabel, has lived here since her family fled Amsterdam in 1944. Now Isabel lives alone in the house and devotes herself to cleaning and polishing her late Mother’s cherished things, special plates with the design of a hare, fancy silverware, and furniture. She also gardens maniacally. Everything looks perfect, though Isabel’s mental health is none too good.

Then her younger brother Hendrik tells her the things were not Mother’s at all, but came with the house. Isabel is uncertain.  That couldn’t be true, could it?  And when her older brother Louis installs his sexy girlfriend, Eva, in the house with Isabel, while he takes a business trip, she is outraged. She should not have to deal with this silly woman. Spoons begin to disappear. Either Eva or the maid is stealing. But the house belongs to Thomas, and he can move in and kick out Isabel any time he wants.

If this novel were by Evie Wyld, author of the superb novel, The Bass Rock, we would be on board. Wyld writes elegantly and lyrically about a house, and meticulously etches the characters and their surroundings. But The Safekeep is lumbering and lackluster, lacking complexity, even as the relationship between Isabel and Eva intensifies. The one saving grace is Eva’s diary, in the final part of the book.

The  judges must have thought,. “Well, it’s not special but what about the ending?”

Yes, but… there’s the rest. It won’t win the Booker! The judges are not high: just diplomatic.