Review: "You Should Have Left" by Daniel Kehlmann

While it is entirely unintentional, I tend to be reading in patterns as of late, with the book I finished earlier today Binary Star being very thematically similar Chemistry, I book I finished earlier this week. And now, Daniel Kehlmann’s You Should Have Left being a haunted house story very similar to a book I read last week The Grip of It. But instead of being a weaker version of an earlier book I have read, this is a stronger version of the earlier book, one that gets everything right, from its size (it is a brisk 114 pages that I finished in a little over an hour), to it’s fractured narrative structure all the way down to it chilling atmosphere, which seeps into your bones and has you reaching for the nearest night light. I liked The Grip of It for what it was, which was a simple, if unapologetically modern haunted house story, this slim novel (really a novella) I feel tackles a bit heartier and deeper material such as the ambivalence of the creative process, parental short comings and horror of finding out you are not as strong as you think you are. And it is the kind of short little book that I could only expect from someone like Kehlmann, a writer I have been obsessed with since reading his novel in stories Fame a few years ago, and I am happy to see him match that flash of genius with something even more compact and, maybe, even smarter. It starts out with an unnamed male narrator (another trope that I have come across frequently as of recently) dragging his family to the German countryside so he can writer a script for the sequel to the female buddy movie that gave him his name. I will try not to spoil anything, but for a book this short, it is going to be hard for me to review it without giving too much away. The weird things start immediately. First it is a simple sound interrupting his writing, one that couldn’t possibly have come from his wife Susanna or his four-year-old daughter Esther. It only gets worse from there. There is a strange dream sequence involving a woman with narrow eyes whose picture appears and disappears, a strange trip to the local grocery store where the clerk is eerily vague about his intentions and what is actually going on in the house, to a revelation that brings forth the book’s harrowing final few pages that is guaranteed to send shivers down your spine. It is the little details in this book that really got to me; such as the way what is happening seeps into his script, sections of which make up a significant portion of the book, the things his daughters say and the whole book’s ambiguous nature and the questions it leaves unanswered. I have compared Kehlmann to Auster before, but I don’t think Auster could ever have the guts to grab you by the throat like this. I am both in awe and in fear of such a book.

Rating: 5/5