[Spoilers]
Novels promise us again and again that love conquers everything, and we never tire of hearing it. We are more than happy to suspend our disbelief and devour stories about how love, pure love overcomes everything- greed, trauma, avarice, the desire for revenge- all of it.
However literature's ability to deliver this message effectively and plausibly varies wildly. Yael van der Wouden's awarded story, a non-murder mystery of reconciliatory post-WWII love between a Dutch Jewish woman and a gentile woman who is occupying her family house certainly falls on the less-plausible, uhuh yeah sure I guess so side of narratives.
I suppose if The Safekeep is read as a fantasy about the power of love (read: orgasms, lots of them) to settle land and house disputes between Jewish and non-Jewish people, then yes, but as a convincing story of how people behave in chaotic post-war societies, trying to piece together fragments (literal fragments and shards of plates and objects in this book) of their former lives, then no. Nope. Never happened, never will.
The book seems much-loved and distinguished, so clearly I am the bitter cynic whose eyebrows are raised so high that they almost disappear into my greying hairline at the notion that a family who were content enough to occupy the house of Jewish neighbours when they conveniently vanished in the peak of WWII are now, a mere fifteen years later, equally happy to change the deed titles of the house- a whole house! at the request of the daughter who has -equally conveniently- fallen in love with the Jewish woman who would have rightfully inherited the property, and has now returned to claim -via bisexual seduction- what is rightfully hers.
Ok, yes sure. The power of love. Uhuh. [Turns on news channel, turns them off again]
by 1000andonenites