We get it—there is simply too much. So, as in years past, we are giving our editors a last-minute opportunity to plug the things that maybe got away. See all the things you really should have read, watched, or listened to—as well as more of our year in review coverage—here.
Even for those of us who read semi-professionally, there are the ones that got away. I pride myself on being the first port of call for friends, family, and members of my book club when it comes to recommendations. And yet! Do you recall that scene from David Lodge’s under-appreciated (though probably dated) campus novel Changing Places, where the characters—English faculty all—play a game in which they admit to the most famous book they haven’t read? The main character claims Hamlet…and then loses his job. We all have our blind spots.
This year, my literary blind spot wasn’t so obvious as the Bard’s best-known work; rather, it was a book that took me by surprise, until a handful of people I really trust recommended it to me. “It was the book I loved the most—that I didn’t represent,” a literary agent whispered recently at a holiday party. Is there a better endorsement?
The Safekeep by Yael Van Der Wouden tells the story of Isabel, who lives alone in the Dutch province of Overijssel in 1961. The house is quiet; Isabel exerts herself mainly in her garden and in consternation over whether the maid is stealing from her. Her parents are dead and her brothers, Hendrik and Louis, have fled their rural home for livelier urban settings. Henrik lives with his boyfriend, Sebastian, though no one, least of all Isabel, who maintains a maternal closeness to her younger brother, can admit the nature of his relationship. Louis is a philanderer, and it is his latest simultaneously casual and intense relationship that catalyzes the events of the book. “Louis usually brought girls to their dinners,” Van der Wouden writes, and in this instance he brings Eva, a bleached blonde woman in a badly made dress. “She was pretty in a way that men thought women ought to be pretty.”
Eva ends up moving into the house, installing herself in the room formerly occupied by the siblings’ now deceased mother. Louis has to travel, and there’s the sense that Eva has nowhere else to go—a vague rationale that feels at once inevitable and illogical. Isabel almost immediately develops an intense dislike for Eva, a disorderly presence who disrupts the strictly regimented life Isabel has built for herself. Eva says the wrong thing, leaves a mess, walks through the house with a lit cigarette. Isabel seethes, the intensity of her emotion quietly roiling.
