You should Have Left by Daniel Kehlmann (translated by Ross Benjamin).
Title: You should Have Left.
Author: Daniel Kehlmann (translated by Ross Benjamin).
Genre: Fiction, novella, epistolary fiction, diary, writing, mystery, mental health.
Country: Germany.
Language: German.
Publication Date: 2016.
Summary: The novella is an eerie and supernatural tale of a writer's emotional collapse in a diary record of the seven days that he, his wife, and his four-year-old daughter spend in a house they have rented in the mountains of Germany-a house that thwarts the expectations of his recollection and seems to defy the very laws of physics. He is eager to finish a screenplay for a sequel to the movie that launched his career, but something he cannot explain is undermining his convictions and confidence, a process he is recording in this account of the uncanny events that unfold as he tries to understand what, exactly, is happening around him-and within him.
My rating: 7.5/10.
My review:
♥ The sun has just pushed its way out from behind the cloud, so that the sky is now melting in painful, blazing, magnificent brilliance.
Or is that too many metaphors? The sun doesn’t push its way anywhere, the wind pushes the cloud away, and of course the sky by no means melts. But in painful, blazing, magnificent brilliance, not bad.
♥ Marriage. The secret is that you love each other anyway.
♥ I had volunteered to put Esther to bed, read her a picture book about a mouse that finds out that the moon is made of cheese. The mouse eats the moon, but afterward it’s still there, and then the mouse falls asleep, and that’s the end of the book. My daughter liked the nonsense, and I liked that she liked it, and she snuggled up to me, and the night snuggled up to the window..
♥ Then we sat until two o’clock in the morning at the table and drank wine and talked. Just like in the old days. Like nine years ago, when we first met on Schmidt’s set. I had never seen such an exciting woman before. Susanna, in case you’re reading this, which I suspect you aren’t, because my work doesn’t particularly interest you, then you should know, it’s true: never in my life! I wanted to touch you and kiss you and know everything about you, wanted to spend my life with you.
And I, she said last night at the table, couldn’t have imagined the day when I’d be yelling at you about diapers or arguing with you about how much to pay babysitters.
But that’s probably as it should be, I said, because I couldn’t think of anything else to say.
♥ Ovid, she said. Actually Heraclitus’s words, but Ovid puts them in Pythagoras’s mouth: There’s nothing in the world that stays the way it is.
♥ And so we thought together back to what it had been like when we had first met: everything as always, everything as if for the first time, candlelight and narrow glasses and this and that bar, the movies, the theater, finally your apartment and then my apartment and then yours again; everything as usual, everything as never.
♥ Whenever I drive, even under the best conditions, I have the feeling of letting myself in for something reckless. So it’s not surprising when I’m overcome with panic on a narrow road of hairpin bends.
This is how it is: You have to be completely unimaginative to sit down without fear in a fuel-filled capsule. One second you’re firmly ensconced in everyday life and thinking about dinner and your tax return, the next you’re wedged in deformed metal while the flames devour you, and all that lies between the one state and the other is a clumsy turn of the steering wheel, half a second of inattention. But I didn’t want to be someone who can’t cope with everyday life. People have simply agreed that driving a car is something harmless.
♥ So: I’m sitting at the long table, it’s getting dark outside, the reflection of the room can be seen very clearly: fridge, stove, kitchen table, the door to the hall, the flat-screen TV, the low gray-green sofa, the lamp over the table, the table itself, the chair in front of it. I also see the plastic bag from which I just unpacked the groceries, it’s lying crumpled on the kitchen table. I see an empty glass next to the crumpled bag-here in the room, there in the reflection.
Only I don’t see myself. In the room in the reflection there’s no one.
♥ Meanwhile Esther was telling us about a friend from preschool who is named either Lisi or Ilse or Else and either took a toy away from her or gave her one, at which point the teachers did either nothing at all or just the right thing, or something wrong; little kids are not good storytellers. But Susanna and I exclaimed That’s great! and Incredible! and How about that! and the relief when she stopped talking brought us closer together.
♥ What’s bothering you?
I don’t want to be alone here.
But we’re next door. We can hear you. We even have this here. I pointed to the camera of the baby monitor. You’re not alone here.
Alone in the room.
What’s so bad about that?
When you’re alone in a room…She reflected. Then everything is different.
In what way?
When you talk, just you hear it.
And?
That’s weird!
Something about that made sense to me.
♥ Who is this David? And although I gathered all my strength to push away the thought, it occurred to me that all this made me feel like I’d stumbled into one of my movies. But that didn’t make it any better. In a movie it’s funny when a life falls apart, because the people say clever things while it’s happening, but in reality it’s only dismal and repugnant. Do you want to deny it? I shouted, and only when she looked at me seriously and calmly and said that she didn’t want to deny it at all did I realize how much I had hoped she would.
♥ I was sitting there and reading my notebook and suddenly heard a noise. It sounded like a human voice, only very high, and it formed words that I didn’t understand, a singsong, rising, falling, and rising again, like nothing I’d ever heard before. It took me a few seconds to realize that it was coming from the baby monitor. But on the screen I saw Esther fast asleep: her head on the pillow, her hand sticking out from under the blanket, no one with her. I ran out, up the stairs, down the corridor, I staggered into her room and turned on the light. No one there. She was fast asleep. What else. I listened. Everything was quiet.
So light out again, softly close the door, down the stairs, but as I was walking down the hall to the living room, I heard the voice again, and it spoke words, strange and ancient, half whisper, half sigh, and when I reached the room and saw on the screen a large figure leaning over Esther’s bed, I felt my heart stop.
Only then did I see that it was me. On the screen, next to the bed, it was me myself. Apparently a delay in the transmission; it was the image from a minute ago, and what I heard was probably a radio signal, and as I realized that and heaved a sigh, I saw my daughter sit up in bed with a jerk, open her eyes, stare at the figure, which was me, and begin to scream.
I ran up the stairs, stumbled, banged my knee on a step, struggled to my feet, hobbled on, and called: I’m coming, I’m coming! Door open, light on, there she lay, asleep.
I pulled up one of the colorful children’s chairs, sat down, breathed heavily, and thought with a clarity as if someone else were speaking to me: You should have left. Now it’s too late.
..And that’s where she’s sleeping now. I’ve locked the door to the living room. Esther is here, that’s all that matters, who or what is up there I don’t want to know. Just a moment ago I saw her still on the screen, sleeping peacefully while the strange voice sang to her-and while she undeniably lay next to me on the sofa. It was unbearable. I pulled the plug.
♥ Eventually the night will end.
♥ The book was about a stuffed bear who is for some reason named Tumtwimbly, and is searching in a land that is actually a large bed for a golden treasure that really is a golden treasure and was hidden by pirates a long time ago. In a hoarse voice I read:
I’ll look over there,
said Tumtwimbly Bear,
and I’ll look everywhere,
until I behold
the treasure of gold.
Who writes this stuff, I thought, how do you keep going, how do you live with yourself when you write things like this?
♥ I took the remote control and turned it on. The news was on, I changed the channel, the news again, I changed it again, the woman with the narrow eyes. Her face filled the screen.
I turned it off. I was ice-cold, the room seemed to be spinning slowly.
You promised, Esther screamed, why did you turn it off!
Unable to think of any other way to distract her, I jumped up and danced around: Right leg up, left leg up, and I let out a yodel and looked at the distant, gray sky and at the glaciers, which wouldn’t help me, and down into the green-gray shadow colors of the valley. For the first time in my life, as I sang and jumped and clapped my hands, I seriously asked myself whether I had gone crazy. But how could you know that, how could you figure it out? Wasn’t the very fact that I asked myself the question proof that I hadn’t? I clapped and jumped, and Esther, who in her astonishment had forgotten about watching television, mimicked me. No, I thought, it’s not that simple. The fact that I’m thinking about it proves nothing.
♥ Strange that I used to find the sight of the stars soothing. I once read that a lot of astronomers think the universe might be infinite. Full of stars, full of galaxies, going on and on and on, going on literally forever.
..And this infinite universe might be only one of an infinite number of infinite universes, each with different laws. One is unreachable from another, they are strictly separate. Normally.
♥ A short while ago there was a man in the room. He didn’t look dangerous, more tired. He wasn’t the man from the framed photo, because he didn’t have a beard, but I think he resembled the woman with the narrow eyes. I couldn’t really tell, because he wasn’t standing on the floor but on the ceiling, and he was looking down at me as if he wanted to ask for help. But he was here only briefly, and I’m so exhausted that I might also have imagined him. Just as I might have imagined that the empty room with the lightbulb and the broken chair now had another door on the other side. I saw it as I carried Esther down the hall, the other door was open, and behind it was another empty room with lightbulb and open door and behind that one a third; I saw it for only a moment, which is why I’m also not sure whether there was really something moving on the floor of the third. We were immediately in the living room, and I locked the door.
It’s the place itself. It’s not the house. The house is harmless, it’s simply standing where nothing should stand. I suspect there are more places like this, but the others are probably unreachable, on the sea bottom or in mountain caves in which no one has ever set foot. Or there’s really only one here, and the next is light years away in the infinite universe. The thought makes your head reel-not a fictitious but a real infinity, filled with things and creatures and galaxies and galaxy clusters and clusters of galaxy clusters and so on and so on, without an end in either direction. And now and then spots where the substance gets thin.
Words. They don’t capture how it really is.
♥ I know now why they all have faces like that. Why they look the way they look. It’s because of the things they have seen.
♥ The place isn’t evil, but it’s a trap-like a crevice out of which you could at first climb, but you see the sky above you and think, it’s not dangerous, and so you dawdle and look around because there are interesting crystals there, and when you finally do want to climb out, you realize too late that every movement brings you down deeper.
I think it has to do with consciousness. That’s why it doesn’t hold everyone with the same strength, me more than the kid, for example; maybe I should have sent Esther down by herself, but maybe that would have been wrong too, how can I know?
♥ I understand the thing with the angle better now too. It’s not easy to put into words. At least not these words. With new words it would be possible. But why bother? If I say that in addition to the three dimensions you have to imagine another three from the other side, or actually from within… But to whom am I supposed to explain this? To the others who are here forever too? They’ve known it for a long time, they already know far more.
♥ But maybe I can warn him, that is, me, that is, the man I just a short while ago was, in this way; maybe call to him through undulating time: Get away. Shout at him: Get away, before it’s too late, whisper it, yell it, that he should stop worrying about his movie and open his eyes and see where he is. Somehow get through to him, keep trying until he hears me, until he reads it, until he sees it, until he understands.