''You Should Have Left'' (Original title: ''Du hättest gehen sollen'') is a 2016 novella by German writer
Daniel Kehlmann
Daniel Kehlmann (; born 13 January 1975) is a German-language novelist and playwright of both Austrian and German nationality. Originally written in German, it was later translated by
Ross Benjamin
Ross Benjamin is an American translator of German literature and a 2015 Guggenheim Fellow. He has won the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize for his translation of Michael Maar's ''Speak, Nabokov''. He also received a commendation from the j ...
into English. The novella is the diary of a screenwriter attempting to write a sequel, ''Besties 2,'' to follow his earlier success, ''Besties''. He is on a deadline for the production studio and includes events from his daily life in his screenplay.
Plot
December 2: An unnamed narrator rents a house through
Airbnb
Airbnb, Inc. ( ), based in San Francisco, California, operates an online marketplace focused on short-term homestays and experiences. The company acts as a broker and charges a commission from each booking. The company was founded in 2008 b ...
for himself, his wife, and his daughter to stay in on vacation. He also spends that time writing the sequel for his screenplay. Susanna disapproves of his screenplay, this starts several fights between them.
December 3: The narrator begins to experience abnormalities in the house. He gets lost while looking for the bedroom. He blames it on him still getting used to the house's layout and starts creating the plot for his screenplay.
December 4: The narrator recalls a strange nightmare. It involves a woman with narrow eyes close to the root of her nose and yellow teeth. He was trapped by fear of her and could not move until the woman stepped away from him, allowing him to wake up. The narrator later realizes the woman was from a photo in the laundry room. Needing groceries, he drives to the local town, nearly having an accident at every turn. In the store, the clerk does not speak much and struggles to retrieve every item on the shopping list. Before the narrator leaves, the clerk gives him a transparent plastic triangle ruler and criptically tells him to try the right angle. The narrator returns to the house and transcribes this interaction into his screenplay. He notices halfway through that he has no reflection and is even able to see items directly behind him. The phenomenon is dismissed as his imagination. The narrator checks for the photo in the laundry room but does not find one, nor he finds evidence that a nail had been in the wall.
December 5: It becomes increasingly difficult for the narrator to tell whether he is dreaming or awake. He discovers his wife has been cheating on him with someone named David. When he confronts her about it, Susanna tells him to think of Esther. The narrator then uses the triangle ruler, discovering when he would draw a right angle it makes a 40x42 angle. Creating a rectangle made a diamond with a 49x51 angle equaling 100 degrees. Susanna returns, and the narrator fights with her until she leaves with the car. He goes back through his notebook to recollect how much Susanna and David had been talking to each other without him knowing. He instead sees Get Away written in his handwriting twice. He suspects his wife wrote it but is unsure how she perfectly fit the words between the words he actually wrote. The narrator hears a high-pitched voice through the baby monitor and checks on his daughter. Seeing that there is nothing abnormal about her or the room, he returns to the kitchen where the baby monitor shows him hovering over his daughter. Esther sits up and screams at the figure of himself. He hears a voice in the baby monitor say, “You should have left. Now it’s too late.” He moves his daughter to the living room couch to protect her. Even with his daughter beside him, the baby monitor still shows her sleeping in the room with someone singing to her. He rechecks the triangle ruler and creates a figure 39x41 degrees.
December 6: The next morning, the narrator wishes to escape by paying for whatever taxi he could buy to leave. He calls the convenience store in town and asks the clerk what happened at the house. He finds out a vacationer had disappeared and was never found again. The building that had been there before the house was a tower built by the devil, and a wizard destroyed it with God's help. Or that a wizard had built the tower, and God destroyed it. He then loses phone service. He tries to leave the locked living room only to have the door lead back to the living room. He writes in his notebook with the hope someone will find it. He then tries walking backward out of the house, thinking it might help him.
December 7: The narrator tries his idea of walking backward with Esther and is able to escape. Esther notices a figure standing in a window of the house, and the narrator pretends it is not there. He walks down the road using his phone's flashlight as the only source of light. Esther complains about the cold and clings to her father for safety. At the end of the road, they see a light; it belongs to the house. The narrator walks back into the house, telling Esther to fall asleep. Susanna returns and apologizes for the affair, saying it was a mistake. The narrator tells her take Esther and get away while you can. He returns to the house alone.
Critical reception
The novella has been well received by critics because of the author's ability to blur the lines between reality and imagination. Ulf Zimmerman complimented Kehlmann for demonstrating how to get his readers "to believe pretty much anything" and referenced the novel to have inspiration from
Stephen King
Stephen Edwin King (born September 21, 1947) is an American author of horror, supernatural fiction, suspense, crime, science-fiction, and fantasy novels. Described as the "King of Horror", a play on his surname and a reference to his high s ...
's '' The Shining''. ''The Brooklyn Rail'' called the novel "a masterful experiment about the limits of literary realism" and credited Kehlmann's use of unreliable first-person narration.
Award nominations
* International Dublin Literary Awards 2019
Film adaptation
The book was adapted into a film, with American actor
Kevin Bacon
Kevin Norwood Bacon (born July 8, 1958) is an American actor. His films include the musical-drama film '' Footloose'' (1984), the controversial historical conspiracy legal thriller '' JFK'' (1991), the legal drama '' A Few Good Men'' (1992), t ...
starring and
David Koepp
David Koepp (; born June 9, 1963) is an American filmmaker. Koepp is the ninth most successful screenwriter of all time in terms of U.S. box office receipts with a total gross of over $2.3 billion.
Koepp has achieved both critical and commercial ...
directing and writing, for production company
Blumhouse Productions
Blumhouse Productions (; also known as BH Productions or simply BH) is an American film and television production company founded in 2000 by Jason Blum.
It is known mainly for producing horror films, such as ''Paranormal Activity'', ''Insidio ...
. Originally scheduled for a theatrical release, the film was released through
video on demand
Video on demand (VOD) is a media distribution system that allows users to access videos without a traditional video playback device and the constraints of a typical static broadcasting schedule. In the 20th century, broadcasting in the form of o ...
on June 18, 2020, by
Universal Pictures
Universal Pictures (legally Universal City Studios LLC, also known as Universal Studios, or simply Universal; common metonym: Uni, and formerly named Universal Film Manufacturing Company and Universal-International Pictures Inc.) is an Ameri ...