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.
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.
