The Director

"Nothing short of brilliant."--The Wall Street Journal

"A surpassingly gifted storyteller." --The New York Times

From "one of the brightest, most pleasure-giving writers at work today" (Jeffrey Eugenides, Pulitzer Prize-winning author), a visionary 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.

An artist's life, a pact with the devil, and the dangerous illusions of the silver screen.

G.W. Pabst, one of cinema's greatest directors of the 20th century, was filming in France when the Nazis seized power. To escape the horrors of the new and unrecognizable Germany, he fled to Hollywood. But now, under the blinding California sun, the world-famous director suddenly looks like a nobody. Not even Greta Garbo, the Hollywood actress whom he made famous, can help him.

When he receives word that his elderly mother is ill, he finds himself back in his homeland of Austria, which is now called Ostmark. Pabst, his wife, and his young son are suddenly confronted with the barbaric nature of the regime. So, when Joseph Goebbels--the minister of propaganda in Berlin--sees the potential for using the European film icon for his directorial genius and makes big promises to Pabst and his family, Pabst must consider Goebbels's thinly veiled order. While Pabst still believes that he will be able to resist these advances, that he will not submit to any dictatorship other than art, he has already taken the first steps into a hopeless entanglement.

Kehlmann's latest oeuvre explores the complicated relationships and distinctions between art and power, beauty and barbarism, cog and conspirator.

"[Daniel Kehlmann] is a surpassingly gifted storyteller. Among his big influences are the filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen. Like them, he is a master at depicting decent people making terrible choices, with results that are both droll and catastrophic. An atmosphere of moral queasiness permeates The Director, and the author is in perfect control of the barometric pressure."
--David Segal, The New York Times
"Taut, unflinching...sharply observed...incisive, sweeping...arresting."
--Lauren LeBlanc, Boston Globe
"With The Director, the author pushes his affinity for reimagining dark historical moments into yet more provocative territory...nothing short of brilliant."
--Donna Rifkind, Wall Street Journal
"The Director is engrossing and luminous, an epic act of historical imagination and an intimate parable about moral compromise and the seductions of art. After Tyll, I wasn't sure how Kehlmann could possibly top himself. He has. This book is a marvel."
--Ayad Akhtar, author of Homeland Elegies
"A freely imagined conjuring of the life and career of celebrated German-language film director G.W. Pabst by one of Germany's boldest contemporary novelists....The sheer wizardry and audacity of the storytelling...masterfully dances along the cusp of realism and surrealism, comedy and tragedy....An amazing performance by Kehlmann, who as a bonus immerses us in the filmmaking process. A wickedly entertaining, eye-opening book."
--Kirkus Reviews, starred review
"A wonderful book about complicity and the complicity of art. It's also funny, and brilliant."
--Zadie Smith, author of The Fraud, via the Ezra Klein Show
"An incomparably accomplished and inventive piece of fiction by one of the most intelligent novelists at work today."
--Jeffrey Eugenides, author of Middlesex
"Clear-eyed and propulsive...a searing look at the mechanics of complicity."
--Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Daniel Kehlmann is shockingly brilliant, a writer of extraordinary range and grace. At times absurdist, at times horrifyingly realist, The Director asks where the moral duty of the artist resides, and how the narcissism of the artistic project can bleed into complicity."
--Lauren Groff, author of The Vaster Wilds
"Daniel Kehlmann, the finest German writer of his generation, takes on the life of the eminent film director G.W. Pabst to weave a tragicomic historical fantasia that stretches from Hollywood to Nazi Germany, from Garbo to Goebbels, to show how even a great artist can make, and be unmade by, moral compromises with evil. A dazzling performance and a real page turner."
--Salman Rushdie, author of Knife

Daniel Kehlmann was born in Munich in 1975. His novels and plays have won numerous prizes, including the Candide Prize, the Doderer Prize, the Kleist Prize, the Welt Literature Prize, and the Thomas Mann Prize. His novel Tyll was shortlisted for the 2020 International Booker Prize, and Measuring the World has been translated into more than forty languages and is one of the biggest successes in post-war German literature. He currently lives in Berlin and New York.

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