“In the House of Memories” by Yael van der Wouden

This is a review. The author is responsible for the opinions in the text.

Netherlands 1961. The siblings Isabel, Hendrik and Louis meet in a restaurant with Louis’ newest girlfriend. Carefree blonde Eva acts like a weapon, spilling and spoiling herself, and Isabel and Hendrik don’t even bother to be nice to her. They know that they rarely see Louis’ friends more than once.

But then Louis brings Eva to the siblings’ parents’ house, the house where the heterosexual Isabel lived alone since her mother’s death, and leaves her there. For Isabel, the company is more than unwanted – she treats everyone who enters the house with great suspicion and is soon convinced that Eva is stealing from her.

Isabel is very sophisticated about her mother’s possessions, especially the porcelain dishes with rabbits on them that she doesn’t let anyone touch. However, Hendrik points out that there was already porcelain in the house when we moved in during the war years. By the way, wasn’t the whole house already full of things?

And soon Eva’s presence begins to disturb Isabel in new ways.

Yael van der Wouden’s debut novel won the Women’s Prize for Fiction and was nominated for the Booker Prize. The praise from the critics was great. Many people in Sweden will also like the book, and that’s no wonder. It’s a pretty classic historical novel, except that the love story it’s about is a lesbian one.

However, I don’t think the slight poignancy is enough to make the novel stand out from the sea of ​​similar post-war descriptions. Here’s the crux of the matter for me: I read “In the House of Memories” obediently, but I can’t muster up any enthusiasm for it. The plot reflects Isabel’s boredom, which unfortunately also affects me. It’s also not particularly tempting to get along with Isabel’s whiny personality. And when we are invited to the big reveal two thirds of the way through the novel, the twist is exactly what you could have figured out without much effort after the first chapter.

Towards the end, though When Isabel understands who Eva really is, the novel finally gets to the point: post-war collective guilt and self-inflicted amnesia. It is a criticism of a society that has chosen to turn a blind eye, that has never made any effort to provide reparations to the victims of the Holocaust, and that, in fact, has continued to commit new forms of abuse long after the survivors returned to the Netherlands. “Isn’t that funny?” Eva says to Isabel. “Nobody ever knows anything in this country. Nobody knows where they live, who did what, who went where. It’s all a mystery.”

It is an important topic, but the path to get there is too long and too flat. Although “I minnas hus” is an impeccable historical novel on paper, it lacks the most important thing: the spark of life.

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