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The Director

Author Daniel Kehlmann
Narrator Nicholas Boulton
Publisher Quercus
Publish Date 22 May 2025
Run Time 11 hours and 31 minutes
Format Audio
Genre Biographical fiction, Fiction in translation, Fiction: general and literary, Historical fiction, Individual film directors, film-makers.

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What to expect

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

G.W. Pabst, one of cinema's greatest, perhaps the greatest director of his era: when the Nazis seized power he was filming in France, to escape the horrors of the new Germany he flees to Hollywood. But under the blinding California sun, the world-famous director suddenly looks like a nobody. Not even Greta Garbo, who he made famous, can help him. And thus, almost through no fault of his own, he finds himself back in his homeland of Austria, which is now called Ostmark. The returning family is confronted with the barbaric nature of the regime. But Goebbels, the minister of propaganda in Berlin, wants the film genius, he won't take no for an answer and makes big promises. 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.

Daniel Kehlmann's novel about art and power, beauty and barbarism is a triumph. The Director shows what literature is capable of.

Critics 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

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

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

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

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

Smartly entertaining...a marvelous performance - not only supple, horrifying and mordantly droll, but fluidly translated and absolutely convincing

The New York Times

Engrossing . . . lands in the United States at a good time . . . 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

Julia M. Klein, Los Angeles Times

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