A tale inspired by the life of film director G.W. Pabst, who fled to Hollywood to resist the Nazis only to be forced to return to his homeland and create propaganda films for the German Reich.
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.
