Recasts Pabst’s predicament as a Faustian tale, exploring how far an artist will compromise with the devil to continue making his art ... 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 ... A Faust stripped down to his mechanics: We see intimately and intricately how he surrenders, but we aren’t given much idea why ... 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.
