While I find the premise of this intriguing, the execution isn't working for me, so I'm abandoning it at 20%. Perhaps if I knew any of the many, many names Kehlmann insists on dropping it would interest me more, but beyond Greta Garbo and Fritz Lang, I have no idea which of these names are real people. (In the three pages before the point where I gave up, the author names eleven different people, none of whom have appeared in the book before, causing me to lose the will to live.) I should probably have realised that, since I've never watched a Pabst film - had, in truth, never heard of him until this book came out - I might not be interested in his life. But I was expecting it to be about artists being forced to work for authoritarian regimes, in this case the Nazis, rather than a fictionalised(?) biography of a director and the cast of thousands with whom he apparently worked. At the 20% mark, we haven't even reached Germany - we are still jumping from social occasion to social occasion listening to the intentionally banal and narcissistic chatter of film people. Maybe I'm missing out on something wonderful by jumping ship - the vast array of glowing reviews would certainly suggest so - but I'll risk it. I can only assume they are all from people whose interest in and knowledge of the movie industry and film stars of the 1930s is considerably greater than mine.

Another translated banger that I’m pretty sure will end up in my books of the year. It’s The Director by Daniel Kehlmann, translated from German by Ross Benjamin, and it’s everything I love in fiction - it’s dark, funny, imaginative, inspired by real events and people (so you know that google rabbit hole is coming), asks complex moral questions and is above all totally entertaining.

Let me first say that the opening chapter of this book is one of the best I’ve read in a long time. It’s both very funny AND terribly sad, foreboding and tense, and foreshadows much of what’s to come. I was hooked from page one. We begin, of course, at the end.

In Austria an elderly man called Franz, once a movie director, is being interviewed on live television about his career. But Franz has dementia and can’t clearly remember anything from his past. The one thing he insists on is that a notorious film called The Molander Case, directed by his peer G.W Pabst, was in fact never filmed.

Pabst, about whom the novel is really about, was an influential film director in Weimar Germany and abroad - he discovered both Greta Garbo and Louise Brooks (who make cameos in the book) and briefly escaped looming war in Europe in the States. But on a trip home to Austria to visit his sick mother, the borders closed - he and his family were stuck for the remainder of WWII.

But here’s the twist: he’s summoned by the N*zi’s to continue making propaganda films for the Third Reich. And he agrees.

This is a book about the murky differences between complicity and survival. About the how far we push our moral boundaries for the sake of the ones we love - and what that does to them. About what we make ourselves believe in order to make it through the worst of times. About whether doing any of this in the name of art is worth it.

AND MY GOD ITS FANTASTIC!!!!!

I was SO deeply engrossed in this story, which blends fact and fiction (Pabst has two sons, here he is given just one. The aforementioned director Franz never existed) and uses various narrators to tell this story. There are moments of genuine horror and genuine hilarity, sometimes within one scene. The claustrophobia of the regime is perfectly rendered, but so is the absurdity, the unreality of it all. That is life under a dictatorship, and it makes reading this now all the more important.

As for The Molander Case - it was, in fact, filmed in 1945, but the footage has never been found. Kehlmann’s book drives us towards making of the movie, the artistic madness that came of it and a compelling fictional explanation for its disappearance.

YOU WILL BE HOOKED. Haunted, too. This is asking complex moral questions but remains above all highly entertaining. I couldn’t recommend more!

I'm trying to put my finger on what this reminded me of and I think it's a cross between a Wes Anderson film and some of the 70s postmodernist type novels like Philip Roth. It's about a director who is dreaming of making a film about a group of people on a cruise ship who receive a false alarm that war has broken out. This is all set against the backdrop of the actual escalation of the Second World War and whilst he travels through-out Europe to meet with actors and film different scenes he is constantly trying to worm himself out of some dangerous situations.

The structure of this book was very interesting in that it's structured episodically and each chapter of the book is like a snapshot of a different part of the cinematic scene and period, following the same group of actors and directors through the book. Usually I hate things that are structured like this but I actually felt really enveloped in the novel and like the scene felt alive and real around me.

I definitely recommend if you are interested in historical European cinema although it doesn't feel like historical fiction, which is a good thing in my opinion. It has a modern wit and underlying tone to it and I absolutely adored the climax of the book as it felt like a fresh spin on something which was reminiscent of the 40s. Really do recommend this one if it seems like it's up your street - can get quite monotonous at times but there is enough steam in the book in terms of the pacing, humour and main character to make it worthwhile.

The Director by Daniel Kehlmann is a sharp, darkly comic book that explores power, manipulation, and the blurred lines between performance and reality. Kehlmann’s prose is lean and precise.

The book packs a quiet but unnerving punch, drawing readers into a world where artistic ambition teeters on the edge of cruelty. It’s a haunting exploration of ego, influence, and the fine line between brilliance and tyranny.

The Director tells the story of Austrian film director G. W. Pabst who found himself trapped after the annexation of his country, apparently with no choice but to produce films for Goebbels’s Ministry of Public Enlightenment Propaganda.
After a spell working in Paris, Pabst took his family to Hollywood, far away from the trouble brewing in Europe, hoping to pitch an idea which falls flat thanks to his poor English and no one knowing who he is. After an alarming telegram from his mother, the family return home where Ericka is looked after by a couple straight out of Cold Comfort Farm. Despite his determined refusal to work for the Nazis, he finds he has no choice, or perhaps he convinces himself of that. Pabst has already compromised himself working with Leni Riefenstahl in the late 20s, but this will be a much greater betrayal of his ideals, one which sees Trude take to drink. He begins to think of his work as art, fashioning his last film into a masterpiece in his own head despite the flimsy plot of the book on which it's based. The Molander Case is close to completion in Prague when the Uprising opens the doors for the Russians. Pabst and his assistant catch the last train to Vienna carrying seven reels of film with them.
Daniel Kehlmann is at pains to point out that his book is a work of fiction with very little in the way of primary sources to draw on. Pabst sank into obscurity after the war, his reputation destroyed with little trace left of him in cinema history. It’s a fascinating story, executed well, but not my favourite Kehlmann which is a tossup between the door stopping Tyll, set in the seventeenth century, and You Should Have Left, a slim slice of contemporary gothic