Visible cracks

One of the challenges for a translator is how smooth to make the transition from source language to English. Some, perhaps in tune with a current purist mood, cleave to the original: I’ve recently seen the Italian pacifico translated as “pacific” rather than “peaceful”. Most hope to preserve the feel of the source text without – how you say? – indulging in a kind of faux foreignness. However carefully one treads, there is always a risk of traducing rather than translating.

With The Safekeep, which is on the shortlist for this year’s Booker prize, the Dutch author Yael van der Wouden has bypassed this conundrum. Her novel is written in English, a language she speaks well, but (apparently) not perfectly. As a publishing development, a novel in imperfect English seems both radical and obvious: roughly three times more people in the world speak English as a second language than as a first; social and professional settings easily accommodate both groups, so why shouldn’t publishing? But there is a difference between listening and reading.

While reading The Safekeep, my fingers itched for a red pen. Within the first twenty pages there are phrases such as “Isabel excused herself to the bathroom”; “Hendrik turned sharp”; “Isabel said she must get back before the rain would start”; “Friendship had always seemed a distrustful thing to Isabel”. A small desk is described as a “secretary” instead of a secretaire, resulting in the line: “As a child Isabel would crawl under the secretary”. We get “dredge” where “dregs” would make more sense; “she came up empty” instead of “empty-handed”. The solecisms have either been deliberately employed by the author or, one assumes, deliberately uncorrected by her editors. Their effect is to make this story about Dutch people actually sound Dutch, without any intervening contrivances by a translator. There is an admirable logic to that, but it makes for frustrating reading.

The action takes place in 1961 in the rural community of Overijssel, where Isabel, now in her late twenties, lives alone in the house where she was raised with her two brothers. The house, acquired for them by an uncle, was fully furnished when the family moved in, escaping dire wartime conditions in Amsterdam. Isabel is a prickly character, still mourning the death of her mother and overly possessive of the house and its contents. She regularly audits household items and keeps a close eye on the maid. Inevitably, then, she is dismayed when her brother Louis moves his girlfriend, Eva, into the house while he is away travelling. Eva is brash and noisy, insensitively installing herself in the room that belonged to Isabel’s mother. When items of cutlery and crockery go missing, Isabel is convinced that Eva is stealing from her; but her suspicion is complicated by a growing attraction between the women. Finally, Eva seduces her and the two embark on a passionate affair. “Steamy” may be a cliché, but it’s fair to say this is hot stuff.

At around this point in the novel I tried, like Isabel, to let my hair down and yield to the sensual mood. Van der Wouden’s movement through English creates some lovely, strange phrases. Eva’s perfume “bullied itself around the house”; “Dawn was paling behind the curtains”; “the whole lake turned its face in unison”; “She leaned into rooms and the rooms leaned away”. The author’s descriptions of sex are particularly original and graceful:

Eva was still wet from the lake, pushed the water through Isabel’s dress, and Isabel could only catch up: could only try to hold her in return, try to gentle the embrace, and if not gentle then match it somehow – match the dig of her fingers, the rhythm in how she moved.

That said, a large portion of the novel is occupied by the women either wanting to have sex or vigorously having it. I found myself longing for some humdrum descriptions of 1960s Overijssel.

Around two-thirds of the way through The Safekeep, there is a revelation so exquisitely well done that it puts a different complexion on everything that has come before. It is almost enough to nullify one’s linguistic qualms. I don’t want to rob fellow readers of that experience, except to say that it sheds a terrible light on the experience of Jews in the postwar Netherlands.

English literature has always thrived on the daring of rule-breakers. Do you need to know what the rules are, though, in order to break them? My hunch is that you do, but Yael van der Wouden has made me think differently. While the awkwardness of the reading experience was, for me at least, an obstacle, this book about broken humanity undoubtedly draws power from its broken English. An hour after finishing The Safekeep I was still shivering.

Miranda France is a consultant editor at the TLS

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