You Should Have Left by Daniel Kehlmann | Book Review

You Should Have Left by Daniel Kehlmann (translated from the German by Ross Benjamin)

Published by Pantheon, 2017

My rating:

[image error]This is an unsettling and surprisingly provocative little tale that is perfect for a spooky autumnal evening. We follow a writer and his family as they rent a seemingly idyllic house nestled between two mountains, so that he can finish the screenplay that has been eluding him. Barbed warnings from the locals precede strange nightmares and even stranger goings on within the house. As the building itself appears to shift and transform, the family’s attempts to leave prove fruitless.

There are a few genuinely chilling moments in this that I loved, and these alone make this brief story well worth your time. The writing and translation are both solid, sections of fragmented prose reflecting our narrator’s deteriorating mental state as panic and confusion set in, and the house’s oddities begin to affect his psyche.

Whilst this can absolutely be enjoyed as a fairly standard haunted house narrative, I felt Kehlmann was drawing on genre conventions to explore an interesting extended metaphor that helps set this apart. For much of the story, our narrator laments his struggles to try and pen the sequel to a successful light-hearted movie he considers a sell-out cash grab. The more he lies to himself and his studio colleagues regarding his stalled progress on the script, the more the house extends its grip. Add to this his feelings of inferiority to his university educated wife, and the pressure he feels to meet the constant demands of parenthood. Suddenly, the book can be read as allegory for sacrificing artistic integrity and taking for granted the things we value most, all in the vapid pursuit of success and money.

Whilst the horror elements weren’t entirely original, and I wasn’t always wholly convinced by our narrator’s voice (he felt a little too unphased by his situation, and a tad too quick to accept it at times), I’m glad I picked this up. I would recommend it to those who like their horror subtle, layered, and more than a little uncanny.

You can pick up a copy of You Should Have Left by clicking here. If you’ve already read it, I’d love to hear your thoughts!

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