Latest news with #YaelvanderWouden
The Guardian
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
More sex please, we're bookish: the rise of the x-rated novel
When the judges awarded Yael van der Wouden's brilliant debut, The Safekeep, the Women's prize for fiction last month, they weren't just garlanding a book that happens to have a few sexy scenes in it. They were responding to a work that engages with the current levels of literary excitement around sex and marries this with sweeping historical vistas and a distinctive sensibility. It was joined on the shortlist by Miranda July's exuberant odyssey of midlife desire, All Fours, and Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis, a smart, quickfire account of a young academic's work for a UN deradicalisation programme, which juxtaposes the world of Middle Eastern religious politics with a closeup relish for female sexuality. While younger generations, at least, have said in recent years that they want to see more platonic friendship and less sex on screen, reading appetites appear to be going in the other direction, with a huge boom in romance and 'romantasy' – the romance-fantasy hybrid driven by TikTok and the success of authors such as Rebecca Yarros and Sarah J Maas. We all have strong, mixed feelings about sex, and the cultural landscape reflects the whole spectrum of kinks and hangups. But that means that we have all the more need for writers like Van der Wouden, July and Sally Rooney, who push the boundaries of how explicit the literary novel can be while also giving us new ways of imagining how desire works within lives today. Ours is a dual age of identity politics and porn. We get our identities from sex – queer or straight, pansexual or 'incel' – but it's also the white-hot arena in which identity melts down. In the wake of the #MeToo movement, when pornography is everywhere and Gillian Anderson is collecting thousands of sexual fantasies with anthropological zeal, it seems we still need literature to tell us new things about sex. What I found, reading recent work by authors including Rooney, Van der Wouden, Jen Beagin, K Patrick and Eimear McBride, were unpredictable fusions of the two impulses. Lovers, dutifully preoccupied with questions of identity by day, find that in bed they can transcend selfhood, outstripping their identities. To surrender individuality and accept the dissolution of the self, to lose sight of who is in control – these possibilities have preoccupied erotic writers since the early 20th century, when sex first became representable in literary fiction. Back then there was DH Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, staking the redemption of humanity on sexual transformation. In Lawrence's wake came Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin and Georges Bataille – all about abjection and breaking taboos. Then the outrageously argumentative Norman Mailer and John Updike, whose frank delight in the female form called out for a feminist backlash. It came in the shape of Kate Millett's wittily polemical 1970 Sexual Politics and a new wave of sexually explicit novels by women concerned less with celebrating than with demythologising sex. Erica Jong's epochal 1973 Fear of Flying ushered in the 'zipless fuck' – sex without strings – and allowed a generation of feminists to experiment with promiscuity, but for all its brilliance on psychoanalysis and marriage, the book is pretty terrible on sex. It took another backlash – within feminism itself – to make sex great again. In 1967 Susan Sontag had written The Pornographic Imagination, an essay defending writers such as Bataille from prudery and fighting to classify pornographic writing as literature, even or especially when it exceeded realism. 'Tamed as it may be, sexuality remains one of the demonic forces in human consciousness,' she wrote – so why not make it a resource for 'breaking through the limits of consciousness'? Angela Carter took on Sontag's ideas in her 1978 study, The Sadeian Woman, arguing against feminists concerned to outlaw porn, and making the case for the 'moral pornographer' – an artist who 'uses pornographic material as part of the acceptance of the logic of a world of absolute sexual licence for all the genders'. Sontag and Carter saw that the power of sex lay in opening selfhood to otherness with extravagant force. Otherness and innovation go together, so great writing about great sex always has radical potential. The parameters they set out still define the best possibilities of what sex writing can be, though plenty of men – from Philip Roth to Michel Houellebecq – came along in the meantime to try to prove that male desire was still fascinating. Reading in our contemporary era, I find myself most riveted by writers who continue Carter's tradition. Published earlier this year, Sophie Kemp's Paradise Logic tells the satirical story of a young woman's attempt to make herself into the ideal girlfriend and, in doing so, exposes the patriarchal nature of porn culture. But precisely because it's so clever and sassy it reveals the limits of satire, whereas other contemporary novelists are bringing together the pornographic and the transcendent in a more transporting way. It's telling that these writers are more often writing gay than heterosexual sex. Garth Greenwell, who has described himself as wanting to write scenes that are '100% pornographic and 100% high art', is more trammelled by questions of identity than Alan Hollinghurst was when he wrote The Swimming-Pool Library – a book Greenwell credits as an inspiration. Greenwell is writing sex in the age of consent and dutiful identity politics, but arguably it's these constraints that power his existential quest. There's a scene in Greenwell's 2020 Cleanness where the pornographic and the transcendent explicitly entwine. The narrator has a BDSM encounter with a Bulgarian man he calls Svetcheto, 'the little saint'. The usually submissive narrator has agreed to dominate. It's a brutal scene, all the more frightening because it mirrors an earlier encounter when the narrator was dangerously violated. We're worried both that he'll reenact that violence and that he won't carry off this new role. But then it becomes clear he's enjoying himself. Suffused by mutual, unexpected transcendence, the couple's porn-inspired identities simultaneously break down and burst into flower. Laughing, Svetcheto licks away the narrator's tears. 'Do you see? You don't have to be like that,' he says. 'You can be like this.' Jen Beagin, K Patrick and Yael van der Wouden write moving, powerful portraits of lesbian desire, full of anatomical detail. Beagin's Big Swiss is a large-hearted tale of a love affair between Flavia, an absurdly beautiful gynaecologist, and Greta, the more klutzy, down-at-heel writer who's paid by Flavia's sex therapist to transcribe her sessions. 'Her pussy looked like advanced origami. A crisp pink lotus flower folded by a master. Greta briefly rearranged it with her mouth.' The sex scenes in Patrick's Mrs S are less metaphorical and more breathlessly desiring, though the prose is taut in its lyricism. It can feel like the plot – a love affair between the 22-year-old new teaching recruit and the headmaster's wife in a girls' boarding school – is an excuse for the sex scenes, but in a way that's the point. In both books, it is striking how quickly sex reveals the existential need for transformation. Even in that first sex scene, Greta feels as if she's reached a place 'she's been visiting in her dreams for years and forgetting'. Mrs S is casually historical – set in the 1980s or 90s – which means its identity politics can be implicit: the narrator wears a chest binder but the book doesn't raise questions of trans identity. Instead it is preoccupied with the loss of identity, as the narrator feels herself remade as the 'You' she becomes in her lover's mouth. 'It is as if she has always been waiting for this arrival, of me into my body. You. I don't have a name. Isn't it so much better, to not have a name, to be dropped straight from the clouds?' The sex scenes are more shocking in Van der Wouden's The Safekeep because the subject matter is so serious. This is the story of a violently sudden passion that becomes a love affair between Eva, a displaced Jew, and Isabel, a gentile woman who has unwitting power over her. The book is set in the aftermath of the second world war and, given the gravity of the material, some reviewers have wondered if the sex scenes are necessary. But this is to miss the point, which is that the book only works if the relationship throws both women entirely off-kilter – using the edges of porn to show sex derailing not only their lives but their selves, and indeed the conventional novel form itself. Isabel finds herself vulnerably, joyously powerless in an unfamiliar body: 'At Eva's mercy, trapped between the cage of her teeth, she had grown a new shape.' Van der Wouden insists that her complex sense of character development justifies sexual explicitness. But she has also been clear in interviews that no justification is needed: 'The girls deserve to have some fun. This was my mantra while writing: Let them have some fun!' So what about those writers daring to write explicit, ecstatic heterosexual sex? The most compelling are Eimear McBride, whose The Lesser Bohemians makes the reader feel as though they are almost inside the bodies of the protagonists, and Sally Rooney, who is casually magisterial at writing sex scenes that are at once radiant and minutely observed by her overthinking characters. Like Greenwell, Rooney balances a commitment to a contemporary vision of identity and consent with a willingness to explore the pull of dissolution and abjection. Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion In Intermezzo, the young chess genius Ivan checks repeatedly that his lover likes what he's doing, while his brother Peter half-exploits Naomi, a young woman who has sold pornographic images of herself and remains too willing to abase herself for men. But beneath these exterior sexual identities are their private bodily lives, and sex is the best means of growth they have. Rooney follows McBride in dizzyingly contorting her sentences: 'Deep pressing almost hurting and she felt him throbbing, wanting to, and she wanted that also, wet inside, image of silver behind her closed eyelids, jetting, emptying into her …' Rooney is surprised that people don't ask her more often about the place of sex in her novels; 'the erotic is a huge engine in the stories of all my books,' she has said. But it is in All Fours that the full possibilities of Carter's 'moral pornography' are realised. July's novel manages to be at once an ethnographic account of women's perimenopausal sexuality and a more darkly anti-realist tale of a woman living out her sexual fantasies. The narrator spends vast sums transforming a small-town hotel room into a sumptuous dreamscape, where she tests her capacities for love and lust with Davey, a beautiful, potent but determinedly chaste young dancer she meets at the gas station. The encounters with Davey are brilliantly, exuberantly realised – all the more so because July never loses sight of their comedy. In the absence of sex, they seek consummation elsewhere, and at one point Davey changes her tampon. The scene is both bathetically comic, intensely erotic, and unexpectedly moving. But it is once she and Davey part and the narrator has sex with sexagenarian Audra that the novel becomes incandescent. The narrator is home now, adjusting to her former life, but has negotiated a weekly night in the hotel. She seeks out Audra, who had a relationship with Davey years earlier, desperate to compare notes. 'Fantasies are all good and well up to a certain age,' Audra says, 'Then you have to have lived experiences or you'll go batty.' And so Audra describes her sexual past with Davey, while both women masturbate, an experience that, for the narrator, 'lit up new neural pathways, as if sex, the whole concept of it, was being freshly mapped'. As a sexual encounter, this is moving and original. As a vision of womanhood undergoing feats of change and confronting mortality, it's extraordinary. This scene takes us beyond realism. In her life at home, July's narrator is casually, matter-of-factly bound up in the sexual questions of her contemporary world: she has a nonbinary child and is anxiously aware how limited her sex life is by motherhood. But July uses the narrator's experiences in the hotel room to bend and test our sense of novelistic, psychological plausibility. It is a place where identity can be discarded and remade. Sex remains at the centre of much of the best fiction, and we need powerful fictions to show us what sex is or can become. This is where realism comes up against something stranger, and body and consciousness undo and affirm each other, because it can be at once so ordinary, and so transcendent. Lara Feigel is the author of Look! We Have Come Through! – Living with DH Lawrence (Bloomsbury).
The Guardian
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
More sex please, we're bookish: the rise of the x-rated novel
When the judges awarded Yael van der Wouden's brilliant debut, The Safekeep, the Women's prize for fiction last month, they weren't just garlanding a book that happens to have a few sexy scenes in it. They were responding to a work that engages with the current levels of literary excitement around sex and marries this with sweeping historical vistas and a distinctive sensibility. It was joined on the shortlist by Miranda July's exuberant odyssey of midlife desire, All Fours, and Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis, a smart, quickfire account of a young academic's work for a UN deradicalisation programme, which juxtaposes the world of Middle Eastern religious politics with a closeup relish for female sexuality. While younger generations, at least, have said in recent years that they want to see more platonic friendship and less sex on screen, reading appetites appear to be going in the other direction, with a huge boom in romance and 'romantasy' – the romance-fantasy hybrid driven by TikTok and the success of authors such as Rebecca Yarros and Sarah J Maas. We all have strong, mixed feelings about sex, and the cultural landscape reflects the whole spectrum of kinks and hangups. But that means that we have all the more need for writers like Van der Wouden, July and Sally Rooney, who push the boundaries of how explicit the literary novel can be while also giving us new ways of imagining how desire works within lives today. Ours is a dual age of identity politics and porn. We get our identities from sex – queer or straight, pansexual or 'incel' – but it's also the white-hot arena in which identity melts down. In the wake of the #MeToo movement, when pornography is everywhere and Gillian Anderson is collecting thousands of sexual fantasies with anthropological zeal, it seems we still need literature to tell us new things about sex. What I found, reading recent work by authors including Rooney, Van der Wouden, Jen Beagin, K Patrick and Eimear McBride, were unpredictable fusions of the two impulses. Lovers, dutifully preoccupied with questions of identity by day, find that in bed they can transcend selfhood, outstripping their identities. To surrender individuality and accept the dissolution of the self, to lose sight of who is in control – these possibilities have preoccupied erotic writers since the early 20th century, when sex first became representable in literary fiction. Back then there was DH Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, staking the redemption of humanity on sexual transformation. In Lawrence's wake came Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin and Georges Bataille – all about abjection and breaking taboos. Then the outrageously argumentative Norman Mailer and John Updike, whose frank delight in the female form called out for a feminist backlash. It came in the shape of Kate Millett's wittily polemical 1970 Sexual Politics and a new wave of sexually explicit novels by women concerned less with celebrating than with demythologising sex. Erica Jong's epochal 1973 Fear of Flying ushered in the 'zipless fuck' – sex without strings – and allowed a generation of feminists to experiment with promiscuity, but for all its brilliance on psychoanalysis and marriage, the book is pretty terrible on sex. It took another backlash – within feminism itself – to make sex great again. In 1967 Susan Sontag had written The Pornographic Imagination, an essay defending writers such as Bataille from prudery and fighting to classify pornographic writing as literature, even or especially when it exceeded realism. 'Tamed as it may be, sexuality remains one of the demonic forces in human consciousness,' she wrote – so why not make it a resource for 'breaking through the limits of consciousness'? Angela Carter took on Sontag's ideas in her 1978 study, The Sadeian Woman, arguing against feminists concerned to outlaw porn, and making the case for the 'moral pornographer' – an artist who 'uses pornographic material as part of the acceptance of the logic of a world of absolute sexual licence for all the genders'. Sontag and Carter saw that the power of sex lay in opening selfhood to otherness with extravagant force. Otherness and innovation go together, so great writing about great sex always has radical potential. The parameters they set out still define the best possibilities of what sex writing can be, though plenty of men – from Philip Roth to Michel Houellebecq – came along in the meantime to try to prove that male desire was still fascinating. Reading in our contemporary era, I find myself most riveted by writers who continue Carter's tradition. Published earlier this year, Sophie Kemp's Paradise Logic tells the satirical story of a young woman's attempt to make herself into the ideal girlfriend and, in doing so, exposes the patriarchal nature of porn culture. But precisely because it's so clever and sassy it reveals the limits of satire, whereas other contemporary novelists are bringing together the pornographic and the transcendent in a more transporting way. It's telling that these writers are more often writing gay than heterosexual sex. Garth Greenwell, who has described himself as wanting to write scenes that are '100% pornographic and 100% high art', is more trammelled by questions of identity than Alan Hollinghurst was when he wrote The Swimming-Pool Library – a book Greenwell credits as an inspiration. Greenwell is writing sex in the age of consent and dutiful identity politics, but arguably it's these constraints that power his existential quest. There's a scene in Greenwell's 2020 Cleanness where the pornographic and the transcendent explicitly entwine. The narrator has a BDSM encounter with a Bulgarian man he calls Svetcheto, 'the little saint'. The usually submissive narrator has agreed to dominate. It's a brutal scene, all the more frightening because it mirrors an earlier encounter when the narrator was dangerously violated. We're worried both that he'll reenact that violence and that he won't carry off this new role. But then it becomes clear he's enjoying himself. Suffused by mutual, unexpected transcendence, the couple's porn-inspired identities simultaneously break down and burst into flower. Laughing, Svetcheto licks away the narrator's tears. 'Do you see? You don't have to be like that,' he says. 'You can be like this.' Jen Beagin, K Patrick and Yael van der Wouden write moving, powerful portraits of lesbian desire, full of anatomical detail. Beagin's Big Swiss is a large-hearted tale of a love affair between Flavia, an absurdly beautiful gynaecologist, and Greta, the more klutzy, down-at-heel writer who's paid by Flavia's sex therapist to transcribe her sessions. 'Her pussy looked like advanced origami. A crisp pink lotus flower folded by a master. Greta briefly rearranged it with her mouth.' The sex scenes in Patrick's Mrs S are less metaphorical and more breathlessly desiring, though the prose is taut in its lyricism. It can feel like the plot – a love affair between the 22-year-old new teaching recruit and the headmaster's wife in a girls' boarding school – is an excuse for the sex scenes, but in a way that's the point. In both books, it is striking how quickly sex reveals the existential need for transformation. Even in that first sex scene, Greta feels as if she's reached a place 'she's been visiting in her dreams for years and forgetting'. Mrs S is casually historical – set in the 1980s or 90s – which means its identity politics can be implicit: the narrator wears a chest binder but the book doesn't raise questions of trans identity. Instead it is preoccupied with the loss of identity, as the narrator feels herself remade as the 'You' she becomes in her lover's mouth. 'It is as if she has always been waiting for this arrival, of me into my body. You. I don't have a name. Isn't it so much better, to not have a name, to be dropped straight from the clouds?' The sex scenes are more shocking in Van der Wouden's The Safekeep because the subject matter is so serious. This is the story of a violently sudden passion that becomes a love affair between Eva, a displaced Jew, and Isabel, a gentile woman who has unwitting power over her. The book is set in the aftermath of the second world war and, given the gravity of the material, some reviewers have wondered if the sex scenes are necessary. But this is to miss the point, which is that the book only works if the relationship throws both women entirely off-kilter – using the edges of porn to show sex derailing not only their lives but their selves, and indeed the conventional novel form itself. Isabel finds herself vulnerably, joyously powerless in an unfamiliar body: 'At Eva's mercy, trapped between the cage of her teeth, she had grown a new shape.' Van der Wouden insists that her complex sense of character development justifies sexual explicitness. But she has also been clear in interviews that no justification is needed: 'The girls deserve to have some fun. This was my mantra while writing: Let them have some fun!' So what about those writers daring to write explicit, ecstatic heterosexual sex? The most compelling are Eimear McBride, whose The Lesser Bohemians makes the reader feel as though they are almost inside the bodies of the protagonists, and Sally Rooney, who is casually magisterial at writing sex scenes that are at once radiant and minutely observed by her overthinking characters. Like Greenwell, Rooney balances a commitment to a contemporary vision of identity and consent with a willingness to explore the pull of dissolution and abjection. Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion In Intermezzo, the young chess genius Ivan checks repeatedly that his lover likes what he's doing, while his brother Peter half-exploits Naomi, a young woman who has sold pornographic images of herself and remains too willing to abase herself for men. But beneath these exterior sexual identities are their private bodily lives, and sex is the best means of growth they have. Rooney follows McBride in dizzyingly contorting her sentences: 'Deep pressing almost hurting and she felt him throbbing, wanting to, and she wanted that also, wet inside, image of silver behind her closed eyelids, jetting, emptying into her …' Rooney is surprised that people don't ask her more often about the place of sex in her novels; 'the erotic is a huge engine in the stories of all my books,' she has said. But it is in All Fours that the full possibilities of Carter's 'moral pornography' are realised. July's novel manages to be at once an ethnographic account of women's perimenopausal sexuality and a more darkly anti-realist tale of a woman living out her sexual fantasies. The narrator spends vast sums transforming a small-town hotel room into a sumptuous dreamscape, where she tests her capacities for love and lust with Davey, a beautiful, potent but determinedly chaste young dancer she meets at the gas station. The encounters with Davey are brilliantly, exuberantly realised – all the more so because July never loses sight of their comedy. In the absence of sex, they seek consummation elsewhere, and at one point Davey changes her tampon. The scene is both bathetically comic, intensely erotic, and unexpectedly moving. But it is once she and Davey part and the narrator has sex with sexagenarian Audra that the novel becomes incandescent. The narrator is home now, adjusting to her former life, but has negotiated a weekly night in the hotel. She seeks out Audra, who had a relationship with Davey years earlier, desperate to compare notes. 'Fantasies are all good and well up to a certain age,' Audra says, 'Then you have to have lived experiences or you'll go batty.' And so Audra describes her sexual past with Davey, while both women masturbate, an experience that, for the narrator, 'lit up new neural pathways, as if sex, the whole concept of it, was being freshly mapped'. As a sexual encounter, this is moving and original. As a vision of womanhood undergoing feats of change and confronting mortality, it's extraordinary. This scene takes us beyond realism. In her life at home, July's narrator is casually, matter-of-factly bound up in the sexual questions of her contemporary world: she has a nonbinary child and is anxiously aware how limited her sex life is by motherhood. But July uses the narrator's experiences in the hotel room to bend and test our sense of novelistic, psychological plausibility. It is a place where identity can be discarded and remade. Sex remains at the centre of much of the best fiction, and we need powerful fictions to show us what sex is or can become. This is where realism comes up against something stranger, and body and consciousness undo and affirm each other, because it can be at once so ordinary, and so transcendent. Lara Feigel is the author of Look! We Have Come Through! – Living with DH Lawrence (Bloomsbury).
Hindustan Times
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Hindustan Times
Yael van der Wouden: 'History also serves as an unfinished thought'
On winning the Women's Prize for Fiction, you note how you stand on the shoulders of queer and trans people before you. Please share the significance of the prize for you? Author Yael van der Wouden (Courtesy It's a huge honour, first and foremost. The word 'woman' as a possessive for me hasn't always been a straightforward one, but my love for stories always has, as has my appreciation for platforms that elevate stories written from the margins. Being acknowledged in this way and read so kindly by the judges — and by so many people — has been a gift, and fully unreal. I've been reading along with the lists for years and can hardly believe I have a little Bessy [the bronze statuette] living in my house now. The other day, I caught a glimpse of my new paperback cover on the counter, and now it has the green circle and the word 'winner' on it. I had my first true, 'Oh my God' moment where the realisation briefly hit home. And then it was gone, and I went back to peeling ginger. 272pp, ₹799; Viking The Safekeep asks readers to reconsider what they own, and discusses people's possessiveness about objects and land. It also raises a wider question about the idea of theft. Were you deliberately invoking these propositions, or did it happen as the story progressed? I come from both a European Jewish heritage and a non-Jewish, Dutch heritage. I have grandparents who fled the war, and grandparents who had to live through the German occupation. I grew up in Israel/Palestine, in a city shaped by colonialism and built on the remnants of destroyed Palestinian villages that go unnamed and unremembered in contemporary Israeli memory. The question of choices made in war, of theft and of land and how people dealt with those choices after all was said and done, is a question that sits at the core of who I am, my position in history. I've been wanting to write something about that for a long time, and for a while, I figured that something would probably end up being an essay or a long read. The idea for the novel came to me almost as a surprise! But once it did, and once I saw the scope of it play out in my mind, the writing became almost compulsive. It's a conversation I'm having with myself, a meditation on homes, on desire, on who benefits from apologies — the person apologising, or the one who is there to receive? Reading The Safekeep, I couldn't help but think of the connections Olivia Laing makes in The Garden Against Time between gardens and post-war real-life stories. Then, I read your essay, On (Not) Reading Anne Frank, where you mention reading Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden. The consumption of the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden explains humans' origins in many cultures. There's, however, something unmistakably erotic about that act. Gardens are also private little paradises where a lot of pivotal scenes in your novel are set, alongside the unabashed, unapologetic eating of the fruit, with its core and all. Am I making puzzling connections here, or were gardens and erotica on your mind, too, while working on this book? Oh, you're absolutely not making puzzling connections here — that's as bang on the money as it gets. My background in academics was a niche within a niche: in Comparative Literature, I was doing Memory Studies, and within that, Landscape Studies. That's a very complicated way of saying: I was writing about and looking at the ways national identity-making and memory-making define the way we shape our environment. One of my favourite lectures to give was one on the history of the suburban lawn, where we trace the path of a lawn from being a symbol of wealth (consider the renaissance Venetian garden, and compare it to your run-of-the-mill monastic garden: the former says, 'I have all this land, and I don't even need to use it for the production of food, that's how wealthy I am!', and the latter says, 'I'll use every piece of this garden to feed and maintain my community'), and how a patch of grass — a plant kept in infancy by its continuous mowing, so it's never allowed to grow into maturity or procreate — has therein become a marker of control—of nature, of wealth. Run that through the mill of industrialism and the making of the suburban city, the creation of the individual under capitalism, and what you end up with is the middle-class home with its small square of well-kept grass to tell the neighbours: I too have money, I too am in control. And yet nature pushes back: continuous weeds to pull out, the roots that grow too deep and the seeds that spread too quickly. The garden is nature's glorious excess, and our relationship to it is one of restraint, of nipping the one to allow the other. There's something compulsive and almost fetishistic in that, isn't there? Certainly, a kind of eroticism in the pretending that we do when we keep a garden, the same theatre of control that we apply to bodies, to desire. In leveraging the diary Eva maintains to further the story, were you trying to invoke the most popular historical record of WWII, the diary of Anne Frank? Eva's recollections are markedly different, for they're not manipulated by hope but document what the diarist has been robbed of; entries are almost tainted by a feeling of revenge. Then, there's your history with Frank, when, looking at you, children in school chanted Anne Frank! so much that the 'nickname stuck'. Initially, when I started writing the novel, I didn't mean for it to have a diary chapter at all! I knew that there needed to come a moment of reveal for Eva, where we find out her true thoughts and desires and how she ended up at the house. My first idea of how to do that was very convoluted and involved a set of initials and an aunt and a trip to the local library — things that bored me just thinking about having to write them. So, I put them out of my mind and began writing the first chapters, figuring that I'd solve that piece of the puzzle when I got there. I realised in that process that Eva had a book with her, and that book was there so that she could take note of certain things and not use it much else, which is how I wrote that at first. The diary solution was a sudden one and one that I definitely struggled with for a few whiny days — I didn't want to take that route, worried I was going to fall into a gimmicky trap, worried indeed over the Anne Frank associations! I wanted to move away from conventional war narratives in many ways (another thread I desperately wanted to avoid: most war stories tend to focus on middle-class and wealthy families, because those are the families that tended to be able to afford the cost of hiding in someone's attic. Those are the ones who more often survived, because there was a delay in how long it took for them to get deported. There's a whole class element to who survived the camps that I rarely see spoken of, and I wanted that woven into the novel so badly … and simply couldn't make it work within the plot). What became clear, though, was that there was my will and then there was the story's desire towards the path of least resistance — a clean, neat story where no one ever leaves the house, and all the explanations needed are there already. In the end, Eva's diary chapter ended up being my favourite chapter to write. I wrote the first half on the six-hour train ride to Berlin, and the second on the return. It was such a relief to get to cast off Isabel's restrictive narrative voice, but especially to get to do it all in the form of a grand reveal. Much of it was cathartic: after a hundred pages of not-knowing, to get to kick down the door and scream out everything that's been happening below the surface. It scratched an itch I often have when in conversation with non-Jewish Dutch people, when the war comes up: this desire to shout, 'You don't even know what you don't know!' The choosing of what went in and what would go was a more collected, restrained exercise; a lot of the research didn't make it in, and I had to be careful and make sure that it still sounded like a diary, not a mouthpiece for academic research — a list of facts. When I sent it in to my editors for a first round of edits, I was sure she'd say that half of it had to go. Surprisingly, they both said: more of this chapter, more of Eva's voice. Great news for me, of course, I had plenty more to say! One of the most satisfying experiences of reading The Safekeep was its deliberate suppression of the characters' train of thought, as if verbalising what's on their minds would give finality, a real shape to their thoughts. Interestingly, as these words hung in the air, someone else would pick them up and carry the conversation forward, as if a co-creation of something mutually thought was being signalled. In the incompleteness of the dialogues, you perhaps wanted to test the thresholds these people could cross or wanted to respect. In that sense, could you reflect on the dialogue writing in the book? The primary rule with Isabel was — she cannot have access. Not to her thoughts, her desires, her feelings. When she feels anything at all, she starts pinching at herself; when she feels desire, she redirects it into anger. When she thinks something that in any way goes deeper than an inch below the surface, she cuts herself off. The moment Isabel has access to herself, that's when we, as her audience, can stop wondering why she is the way she is — and the tension is broken. Isabel herself believes she knows herself, and that fantasy is only maintained as long as she doesn't dig too deep. So much of the novel was writing out bits of dialogue or thoughts and then backspacing them out of existence immediately because 'Isabel would not know this about herself.' I wanted the unfinished nature of thoughts and dialogue to mimic also what it feels like to exist in an environment where history also serves as an unfinished thought. READ MORE: Review: The Safekeep by Yael Van Der Wouden Finally, in celebrating the fierce fire-like desire of a bodily want, you note multiple times that a body doesn't exist unless it's forced into being in the moment during an act of love. While same-sex desires have been considered deviant, there's something utterly mechanical but also philosophical about the love between Isabel and Eva that you describe in the book. To me, so much of that has to do with the body as it's seen and unseen. Both Isabel and Eva enter into the narrative furious with how the world perceives them — they feel utterly invisible in their true form, and only visible as a projection. Isabel is seen by her brothers as an extension of their mother; Eva is seen by her lovers as a mirror image of whatever they want her to be. Neither woman is considered in full until they are pitted against each other. And what they see, at first, is something ugly. Both women despise one another, but there's at least the relief of being despised for who you are, rather than loved for who you're not. The physicality of their desire becomes an extension of that: the body responds to being perceived, especially through Isabel's perspective, which is so deeply tactile. From the very first page, you see how intensely she experiences the world. Everything is vibrant and green, and every smell is overpowering, and every sound is too loud. A breeze could knock the poor woman over! She exists in her body, and the body overwhelms her. The physicality she finds with Eva is both about truth and perception, and it's also about channelling the very tactile way she exists in the world into something physical — touch. Saurabh Sharma is a Delhi-based writer and freelance journalist. They can be found on Instagram/X: @writerly_life.
Indian Express
25-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Indian Express
If you loved The Safekeep, you will devour these 3 books
Yael van der Wouden's The Safekeep is having a moment. The Dutch author's debut novel first captured global attention in 2024 when it made the Booker Prize shortlist. Now, fresh off its Women's Prize for Fiction win, it is once again in the limelight: bookstagram cannot stop swooning over it, and book clubs have added the haunting tale of repression, desire, and unraveling secrets in post-war Netherlands to their reading roster. If you were captivated by The Safekeep, you are likely craving more books that plumb the depth of complicated familial relationships, queer desires and the heavy baggage of history. Here are three reads that share similar themes of intimacy, identity, and the weight of the past. For readers who appreciated The Safekeep's exploration of personal and historical legacies, Martyr! offers a poetic dive into identity, addiction, and the search for meaning. Cyrus Shams, a recovering alcoholic and Iranian-American poet, grapples with grief, art, and the ghosts of his past. Akbar's prose is lush and philosophical, weaving together themes of queerness, what it means to be an immigrant , and self-destruction with raw honesty. Like The Safekeep, this novel balances intimacy with existential weight, making it a perfect follow-up. A timeless classic that, much like The Safekeep, explores forbidden desire and the suffocating grip of societal expectations. Set in 1950s Paris, Baldwin's novel follows David, an American man torn between his engagement to a woman and his passionate affair with Giovanni, an Italian bartender. The tension between private longing and public performance is palpable as one grapples with the themes of secrecy, shame, and self-denial. Treated with mythic grandeur, the The Song of Achilles has become a modern classic of LGBTQ+ literature. Miller, who studied classics, reimagines Homer's Iliad through the lens of Patroclus, an exiled prince who becomes Achilles' closest companion. The story traces their relationship from childhood friendship to passionate love. In the battle of Gods and demigods, the novel shows how the most profound wars are waged not with swords, but with hearts. The 3,000-year-old love story that reads as freshly urgent as any contemporary romance as the inevitable tragedy gains new power when seen through Patroclus' devoted eyes.
Indian Express
13-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Indian Express
Yael van der Wouden wins 2025 Women's Prize for Fiction
Dutch debut novelist Yael van der Wouden has won the 2025 Women's Prize for Fiction with The Safekeep, while physician Rachel Clarke claimed the Nonfiction Prize for The Story of a Heart. Both receive £30,000 (approximately Rs 35 lakh )and the 'Bessie' statuette. Van der Wouden's winning novel, set in postwar Netherlands, explores Jewish identity through a haunting family saga. The intersex author dedicated her win to trans activists, sharing how her own healthcare struggles informed her writing. The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden is the 30th winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction. This unsettling, tightly-plotted debut novel explores repressed desire and historical amnesia against the backdrop of the Netherlands post-WWII. The Safekeep is at once a highly-charged, claustrophobic drama played out between two deeply flawed characters, and a bold, insightful exploration of the emotional aftermath of trauma and complicity. Clarke's winning work offers a profound exploration of organ transplantation, blending medical history with deeply personal narratives. Good Girl – Aria Aber All Fours – Miranda July The Persians – Sanam Mahloudji Tell Me Everything – Elizabeth Strout The Safekeep – Yael van der Wouden Fundamentally – Nussaibah Younis A Thousand Threads – Neneh Cherry The Story of a Heart – Rachel Clarke Raising Hare – Chloe Dalton Agent Zo – Clare Mulley What the Wild Sea Can Be – Helen Scales Private Revolutions – Yuan Yang The judging panel, chaired by author Kit de Waal, praised The Safekeep as 'a masterful blend of history and suspense.' Established in 1996 to address gender inequality in publishing, the Women's Prize continues to champion exceptional writing by women.
