You Should Have Left
now a major motion picture
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3.4 • 5 Ratings
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
A thrilling exploration of psychological disturbance and fear from the bestselling and prize-winning author of Measuring the World.
*Now a major film starring Kevin Bacon and Amanda Seyfried*
On retreat in the wintry Alps with his family, a writer is optimistic about completing the sequel to his breakthrough film. Nothing to disturb him except the wind whispering around their glassy house. The perfect place to focus.
Intruding on that peace of mind, the demands of his four-year-old daughter splinter open long-simmering arguments with his wife. I love her, he writes in the notebook intended for his script. Why do we fight all the time?
Guilt and expectation strain at his concentration, and strain, too, at the walls of the house. They warp under his watch; at night, looking through the window, he sees impossible reflections on the snow outside.
Then the words start to appear in his notebook; the words he didn't write.
Familiar and forbidding by turns, this is an electrifying experiment in form by one of Europe's boldest writers. The ordinary struggles of a marriage transform, in Kehlmann's hands, into a twisted fable that stays darkly in the mind.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A family vacation in the mountains goes terrifyingly off-script in Kehlmann's brief and chilling novel. The narrator, a screenwriter working on a sequel to his last successful film, begins a notebook to record the highlights of the trip. At first, this record shows the conventional frustrations of marriage: the screenwriter feels distant from his wife, an actress named Susanna, and is bored by caring for their four-year-old daughter, Esther. As the rift between spouses widens, however, he begins to notice and describe inexplicable and increasingly frightening phenomena. His reflection goes missing from the windows of the rented house; photographs appear and disappear from the walls; disturbing dreams of "an empty room, a naked light bulb on the ceiling," and a woman with "awful eyes" haunts his sleep. Then a stranger encountered in the nearest village advises him to "quickly get away," and the same message also begins to appear in the notebook, in his own handwriting but it may already be too late to escape the house's influence. Kehlmann (Measuring the World) makes deft use of horror staples and offers commentary on the distinction between art and life: "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." But the plot of this spare and occasionally thrilling novel is ultimately indistinguishable from a by-the-numbers horror flick.
