Du haettest gehen sollen- You should have left- by Daniel Kehlmann

I’m a big fan of the German writer Daniel Kehlmann who shot to world fame with his engaging novel Measuring the World in 2007. More recently I’ve read and enjoyed his novels F and, particularly, Tyll, which was shortlisted for this year’s 2020 International Booker Prize. So I was intrigued to discover via Daisy Johnson’s selection of scary stories for Halloween that he’s also the author of a scary novella called You should have left, translated from German by Ross Benjamin. I decided this was to be my third German read for German Literature Month.

The novella takes the form of a diary written by the first person narrator over the first few days in December. He’s a scriptwriter and working to a deadline to produce the script for a follow up to a rom-com/friends movie called Besties (or Best Friends 2). To help him get on with the job he goes off with his partner Susanna and 4 year old daughter Esther to a remote holiday home high up in the mountains. With the treacherous winding mountain round, the precipitous mountain crags and moonlight occasionally lighting up the inky black skies, we have all the ingredients here for a scary story.

Over the next day or two the family try to settle in, but odd things start happening- a vacuum cleaner falls over, the narrator hears the occasional unexplained noise, he notices a couple of doors in the upstairs corridor that he hadn’t seen before-how strange that they should have paid the price they did for a house with all these bedrooms. At the same time, the writing is not going well and the narrator’s confidence is undermined further by frequent bouts of destructive bickering with Susanna. It’s as if he can’t resist rising to her comments—is it something in the atmosphere of the house making them behave this way?

The narrator goes down to the village store where he’s served by a great slow hulk of a man, and he’s told that the modern designer holiday home they’ve rented has only been there four years. It was built on the site of an older house which was the site of an unspecified tragedy and the disappearance of a guest. Easily done, thinks the narrator, and we the reader, aware of all those treacherous mountain gullies. But as things develop we’re aware of forces other than gravity at work.

On the face of it, we have here a classic haunted house tale. This genre is flagged up with bells on by the visual language and imagery, self-consciously selected by the narrator who, at the beginning, discusses both his choice of language for the diary and visual ideas and script for the film. At the same time, it’s a tale of psychological disintegration. I’ve mentioned the effect on his relationship, but the narrator also experiences a kind of sensory dislocation—it was the unexpectedness of these moments which gripped me by the throat—which puts his sanity at issue. A kind of updated The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, then? The haunted house story with baby monitors and mobile phones? What’s going on here is rather more profound and existential: without giving too much away, we should remember from Measuring the World that this is a writer interested in the big ideas of time, space and displacement.

I was really gripped by this brilliant short horror story which both plays with the genre and illustrates it at its best, thanks to the competent, unfaltering hand of Daniel Kehlmann. And it’s led me back to Measuring the World.