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.
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.
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.
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.
