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 ... A narrative that is largely episodic. Most of those chapter-length episodes are interlinked, but a few are stand-alone. 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.
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.
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.
Bold ... It opens with a tour de force chapter that another writer might have spun into a stand-alone novella ... The dialogue, whether witty, enraged, or moving, reveals each individual. Concise, vivid scenes gather to form the three acts, or parts ... Not a fictionalized biography but a fictional interpretation of a historical figure about whom much remains obscure.
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.
