Smartly entertaining ... Kehlmann freely adds secondary characters and carefully tampers with chronology ... Kehlmann also sprinkles his text with delicious hypotheticals ... A marvelous performance—not only supple, horrifying and mordantly droll, but fluidly translated and absolutely convincing.
Exhilarating ... A sorrowful fable of artistic and moral collapse, but also a novel composed with entrancing freedom, even bravura ... Marvellously entertaining ... Admirably rendered by the translator Ross Benjamin, Kehlmann’s style is sober and matter of fact, the sentences straightforward, undecorated by colorful words or difficult syntax ... It’s hard to believe that The Director, while looking to the past, is not also meant as prophecy or, at least, as a warning ... Kehlmann creates a thrilling version of how the film was made and then a perverse and haunting account of what happened to it. He creates the passion to make art at whatever cost, even at the brink of exhaustion and madness.
Deftly translated ... Sometimes Kehlmann makes smooth transitions from scene to scene; on other occasions his chapters take the form of choppy jump-cuts. This can prove initially disorienting, particularly when he skips forward in time or switches viewpoint ... It would be churlish to take Kehlmann to task over his structure as his episodes comprise a series of enthralling set pieces that, when pieced together, add up to a thoroughly satisfying whole ... Both a vivid depiction of those circumstances and a captivating portrait of the artist navigating them.
If you’re seeking an understanding of the ease with which anyone can be brought, step by small step, to sell her soul to fascism, you must read this book ... The Director is far timelier now than when it was first published in 2023 ... Shines a light on a few extraordinary people and reveals their behavior during the Third Reich to be painfully ordinary ... The author’s Menschenkenntnis is on full display as he documents the little compromises that led millions of people to nod to fascism ... Nothing I’ve ever read conveys so well how people in Nazi Germany got on with their lives ... Kehlmann’s stunning tale of what failure looks like, is a call to strengthen our spines.
The novel unfolds in disjointed vignettes, each containing a murky blend of historical facts and free-styling fantasy. That vagueness grows troubling in the climactic sections ... Kehlmann seems to commiserate, perhaps because his own technical skill in converting cinematic cuts, close-up and tracking shots into a literary vocabulary is nothing short of brilliant. But there is a Pabst-size hole in this novel where the director’s essence ought to be, and in this way the author has given us a Faust legend for our own image-driven era: a queasy blend of reality and distortion that’s ambiguous but not nuanced, sophisticated but skin-deep.
An engrossing meditation on the exigencies of art and the dangers of artistic complicity ... Idiomatic ... With a page-turning narrative that is both technically sophisticated and intellectually engaging, The Director sits at the charmed intersection of commercial and literary fiction ... Most of Kehlmann’s narration is in the third-person, with constantly shifting perspectives that add to the book’s off-kilter feel ... A post facto reflection on his times, it casts a troubling light on our own.
As imaginative and bold in its use of editing as Pabst’s own movies ...
Even at this distance of 80 years, the sense of claustrophobia and ultimate folly is all encompassing. One feels an aching sympathy for Pabst ... Hilarious, merciless and brilliant. The Director has all the darkness, shapeshifting ambiguity and glittering unease of a modern Grimms’ fairytale: it is Kehlmann’s best work yet.
At the start of The Director, Daniel Kehlmann takes that risk and gets away with it ... An enjoyable set piece, well worth the risk ... The chapters are self-contained, almost short stories in their own right ... Ross Benjamin, the novel’s translator, deftly captures the Wodehouse manner ... Kehlmann’s three-part structure for the novel...neatly summarises the director’s career ... The rotating viewpoints allow Pabst to be seen as others see him and ensure that it’s more than his story.
Clever shifts in voice throughout The Director offer new angles on life under Nazi dictatorship ... Such subtle changes in voice throughout the book make for a complicated translation, brought to fruition by Ross Benjamin ... Jakob is an invention, and Kehlmann’s greatest fictional political statement in The Director ... The author’s great skill as a historical satirist…is again on display in The Director.
Freely imagined ... All in all, an amazing performance by Kehlmann, who as a bonus immerses us in the filmmaking process. A wickedly entertaining, eye-opening book.