The Director
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4.7 • 3 Ratings
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year 2025
A New York Times Notable Book of 2025
A Telegraph Book of the Year 2025
A Guardian Book of the Year 2025
An Observer Book of the year 2025
'Supple, horrifying and mordantly droll' New York Times
'Nothing short of brilliant' Wall Street Journal
'A subtle, often darkly funny novel about the relationship between art and power' Sunday Times
'A dazzling performance and a real page turner' Salman Rushdie
From 'one of the brightest, most pleasure-giving writers at work today' (Jeffrey Eugenides), a visionary tale inspired by the life of the 20th century film director G.W. Pabst, who left Europe for Hollywood to resist the Nazis and then returned to his homeland with his wife and young son and began making films for the German Reich.
An artist's life, a pact with the devil, a novel about the dangerous illusions of the silver screen.
G.W. Pabst, one of cinema's greatest, perhaps the greatest director of his era: when the Nazis seized power he was filming in France, to escape the horrors of the new Germany he flees to Hollywood. But under the blinding California sun, the world-famous director suddenly looks like a nobody. Not even Greta Garbo, who he made famous, can help him. And thus, almost through no fault of his own, he finds himself back in his homeland of Austria, which is now called Ostmark. The returning family is confronted with the barbaric nature of the regime. But Goebbels, the minister of propaganda in Berlin, wants the film genius, he won't take no for an answer and makes big promises. While Pabst still believes that he will be able to resist these advances, that he will not submit to any dictatorship other than art, he has already taken the first steps into a hopeless entanglement.
Daniel Kehlmann's novel about art and power, beauty and barbarism is a triumph. The Director shows what literature is capable of.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Tyll author Kehlmann offers a clear-eyed and propulsive chronicle of Austrian filmmaker G.W. Pabst (1885–1967), whose achievements included launching the careers of Greta Garbo and Louise Brooks before he reluctantly collaborated with the Nazis. As an expat in 1930s Hollywood, Pabst enjoys a reputation as a gifted artist and is eager to continue working. His latest idea is a parable for the rise of fascism in Europe, but his pitch doesn't sell, and he's reduced to making a superficial romance. He returns to his native Austria with his wife and their son after learning that his mother's health has declined. But the homecoming is an unpleasant one, as the Nazis have just taken over. Pressure on Pabst escalates after Germany invades Poland and he's summoned to Berlin, where he's coerced into making propaganda films. Though he survives WWII, his reputation is stained by his complicity with the Nazis. Kehlmann is especially effective at illustrating the ease with which people accept the realities of living in a violent police state. As one of Pabst's colleagues puts it to him, "You have to be extremely careful not to say anything wrong, even more so since the beginning of the war. But once you get used to it and know the rules, you feel almost free." It's a searing look at the mechanics of complicity.
Customer Reviews
A singular talent
Author
Multi-award winning and best-selling German-Austrian novelist and playwright. His first novel Die Vermessung der Welt (Measuring the World), based around the relationship (platonic, I believe) between the naturalist Alexander von Humboldt and the mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss was the best selling book in the German language since Patrick Süskind's Perfume (1985), and the second-best selling novel in the world in 2006 according to the New York Times.
Background
The author goes back to another real life historical figure, albeit more recent than in Measuring The World, specifically G W Pabst, a celebrated Austrian film maker in Weimar Germany credited with discovering Louise Brooks and Leni Riefenstahl (sometimes Greta Garbo too, although he didn’t). He went to Hollywood in the 1930s after Hitler came to power. Garbo talked him up but California didn’t suit him so he went back home, where Goebbels was understandably keen to have him make propaganda films.
In brief
This crux of this book is the dilemma Pabst faced between making art and being coopted by the encompassing power of a totalitarian government. The author employs as a framing device, a television interview many years later with a fictional man who was once one of Pabst’s assistants, and an occasional director himself, but is now in nursing care suffering from dementia: the mother of all unreliable narrators in other words.
The centrepiece is Pabst filming in occupied Prague. A number of real historical figures make appearances including Riefenstahl, Goebbels, P G Wodehouse (who was a prisoner of war) and various others not previously known to me (thank you, Wikipedia). The author paints a portrait of Pabst using multiple camera angles as it were and other filmic devices: showing not telling at its finest.
Writing
Extremely clever, sometimes too clever for me
Bottom line
Herr K is a singular talent.