You Should Have Left is a 2017 novella by German writerDaniel Kehlmann. Originally written in German, it was later translated by Ross Benjamin 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: The story starts with an unnamed narrator who rents a house through Airbnb 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, which start fights between them on several occasions. December 3: The narrator begins to experience the abnormalities in the house. He gets himself lost in a different part of the house thinking it was the bedroom. He blames it on him still getting used to the house's layout. The narrator starts to create the main plot for his screenplay. December 4: The narrator recalls a strange, unbelievable nightmare. It is of a woman with narrow eyes close to the root of her nose with yellow teeth. He was trapped by fear of her and could not move until the woman steps away from him allowing him to wake up. The narrator later realizes the woman was from a photo in the laundry room. Needing groceries, the narrator drives to the local town nearly having an accident at every hairpin turn. In the store, the clerk does not talk to him much and struggles to retrieve every item on the shopping list. Before the narrator leaves the clerk gives him a transparent plastictriangle ruler. The clerk tells him to try the right angle and offers no further information about its use. The narrator returns to the house and writes a scene in the screenplay that was his interaction with the clerk earlier. He notices half-way through 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. He doesn't find evidence that a nail had been in the wall either. December 5: The narrator's dreams are becoming more realistic, and he is unable to tell whether he is dreaming or awake. He discovers his wife has been cheating on him with a man named David. When he confronts her about the affair, 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 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. There is nothing abnormal and the room and returns to the kitchen seeing in the baby monitor himself 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 backwards out of the house thinking it might help him. December 7: The narrator tries his idea of walking backwards 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 and he'll explain what happened later. 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'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.
