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
A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year 2025
A New York Times Notable Book of 2025
A Telegraph Book of the Year 2025
A Guardian Book of the Year 2025
An Observer Book of the year 2025
'Supple, horrifying and mordantly droll' New York Times
'Nothing short of brilliant' Wall Street Journal
'A subtle, often darkly funny novel about the relationship between art and power' Sunday Times
'A dazzling performance and a real page turner' Salman Rushdie
From 'one of the brightest, most pleasure-giving writers at work today' (Jeffrey Eugenides), a visionary tale inspired by the life of the 20th century film director G.W. Pabst, who left Europe for Hollywood to resist the Nazis and then returned to his homeland with his wife and young son and began making films for the German Reich.
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.
A New York Times Notable Book of 2025
A Telegraph Book of the Year 2025
A Guardian Book of the Year 2025
An Observer Book of the year 2025
'Supple, horrifying and mordantly droll' New York Times
'Nothing short of brilliant' Wall Street Journal
'A subtle, often darkly funny novel about the relationship between art and power' Sunday Times
'A dazzling performance and a real page turner' Salman Rushdie
From 'one of the brightest, most pleasure-giving writers at work today' (Jeffrey Eugenides), a visionary tale inspired by the life of the 20th century film director G.W. Pabst, who left Europe for Hollywood to resist the Nazis and then returned to his homeland with his wife and young son and began making films for the German Reich.
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.
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.
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.
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.
An incomparably accomplished and inventive piece of fiction by one of the most intelligent novelists at work today.
Clear-eyed and propulsive . . . a searing look at the mechanics of complicity
Smartly entertaining...a marvelous performance - not only supple, horrifying and mordantly droll, but fluidly translated and absolutely convincing
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
Daniel Kehlmann has produced a subtle, often darkly funny novel about the relationship between art and power as exemplified by a brilliant man who loses his way in a moral maze
Daniel Kehlmann's engrossing seventh novel, The Director, proves his mastery of the historical form in reconceiving the life of G. W. Pabst.
A compelling narrative . . . that combines darkness and humour as it traces Pabst's descent into ever nastier places as he chases cinematic glory
Exhilarating . . . a complex entertainment - a sorrowful fable of artistic and moral collapse, but also a novel composed with entrancing freedom, even bravura . . .[by] the leading German novelist of his generation . . . an irrepressible trickster, an endlessly fertile maker of fictional modes.
Wonderful . . . one of the best novels of the year
The Director, Kehlmann's stunning tale of what failure looks like, is a call to strengthen our spines
Kehlmann is a master . . . moral compromises lie at the heart of this superbly imagined novel
A thrilling, vivid reconstruction of famous people caught up in the web of infamous times . . . one of the most provocative and entertaining novels of the year so far
The Director has all the darkness, shapeshifting ambiguity and glittering unease of a modern Grimms' fairytale: it is Kehlmann's best work yet.
Less a poet and more an architect, [Kehlmann] constructs over the course of this novel an unvarnished and unmistakable sense of impending doom . . . magnificent
Darkly comic
Blending fact and fiction, this tale is a study of art and complicity
[The Director] immerses us in a world thick with fear, corruption and self-deception. . . Is it an impressionistic novel about memory? A meta-novel about cinema, effected in a cinematic style recalling that of its title character? . . . The answer is: all these things, and engrossingly so . . . The Director affords us the luxury of historical distance, subtly makes us wonder whether we would in the same place do better than the hapless, self-deceiving Pabst
This darkly funny book about power, manipulation and complicity in the 1930s feels very relevant to the present -day political climate . . . Daniel Kehlmann is strong on how quickly fear and corruption become normalised
A warning from history . . . The Director is a thrillingly bold fiction of a man trapped in the embrace of the Reich; a yarn that is brilliantly entertaining and thumpingly resonant
Engrossing and disturbing by turns, it proves [Kehlmann's] mastery of the historical form
Arguably the best study of an artist corroded by fascism since Klaus Mann's Mephisto
Kehlmann turns Pabst's real-life dilemma into a full-blooded, entertaining epic
Kehlmann's complex portrait, brightened by caustic humor and memorable historical cameos (and fluidly translated from the German by Ross Benjamin), presents an intriguing test of integrity in a fracturing world. The timing couldn't have been better.
Endlessly inventive . . . a sly, shapeshifting entertainment that manages to be both tragic and tricksterish at the same, while asking uneasy questions about art and political compromise
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