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A review by justinkhchen
You Should Have Left by Daniel Kehlmann
5.0
5 stars
A visceral descent into madness, You Should Have Left commits to the disorienting bleakness of a mind losing touch with reality and delivers it in full force; the novel's objective is further clarified by the in-story nod to Stanley Kubrick's The Shining ('That good movie based on the not-so-good book. Which movie? The one with all the Steadicam shots.'). If you are ever curious about the spiraling of a deranged head like Jack Torrance's, this will give you exactly that.
Definitely more of an experimental fiction than a straightforward story; readers who need a defined 'monster' or clear resolution will undoubtedly be grossly unsatisfied; You Should Have Left is all about accidental convergence, broken thought (there are actual half-finished sentences in this novella), and looming hopelessness. I thoroughly enjoy how the style of narrative is parallel to the content it's delivering (the audio-book is equally excellent as well); an unconventionally-told horror in a neat little package.
A visceral descent into madness, You Should Have Left commits to the disorienting bleakness of a mind losing touch with reality and delivers it in full force; the novel's objective is further clarified by the in-story nod to Stanley Kubrick's The Shining ('That good movie based on the not-so-good book. Which movie? The one with all the Steadicam shots.'). If you are ever curious about the spiraling of a deranged head like Jack Torrance's, this will give you exactly that.
Definitely more of an experimental fiction than a straightforward story; readers who need a defined 'monster' or clear resolution will undoubtedly be grossly unsatisfied; You Should Have Left is all about accidental convergence, broken thought (there are actual half-finished sentences in this novella), and looming hopelessness. I thoroughly enjoy how the style of narrative is parallel to the content it's delivering (the audio-book is equally excellent as well); an unconventionally-told horror in a neat little package.