If the setup is shopworn - redolent of the category’s king, “The Shining,” and any number of lesser fright pieces - by the end Kehlmann takes it to provocative and open-ended places. Reading to Esther at bedtime one night, the narrator reaches for a picture book, which he summarizes as “the millipede Hugo’s exciting journey God knows where.” Everyday fatherly tasks, like playing with Legos or blocks with Esther, annoy him more than charm him, though in the end his love for her is a key part of what fuels the climactic tension. The book can seem like a pamphlet warning against domesticity. With a premise not exactly built for laughs, Kehlmann still manages a few darkly comic flourishes, especially when it comes to family life.
He’s there with his 4-year-old daughter, Esther, and his wife, Susanna.
The unnamed narrator is a screenwriter who has retreated to a beautiful, minimalist house in the German mountains that he rented on Airbnb. “You Should Have Left,” in both size and content, feels like a bit of batting practice before the next game that counts. Kehlmann is now in his early 40s, and his reputation has not reached escape velocity in the United States, though his last book, “F,” about the varied fates of three brothers, was another rewarding, finely written effort. It was his sixth book of fiction, but it became his first novel translated into English (and many other languages), and it became an international best seller. Kehlmann was barely into his 30s when his lively novel “Measuring the World” (2005), set in the 19th century, about the naturalist Alexander von Humboldt and the mathematician Carl Gauss, made him a star in Germany. This mind-bending novella about a writer losing his marbles contains images that startle and linger.
The new book by the German-Austrian author Daniel Kehlmann, “You Should Have Left,” is a minor trick for him, but a neat one.
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