Author of the impressive 2017 novel Tyll, among many novels, German author Daniel Kehlmann tackles, in The Director, the story of mid-20th-Century film director G.W. Pabst, who flees the Nazis in the early stages of World War II but then, through happenstance, ends up back in Austria just before Germany conquers and closes borders. Pabst resists but no one can resist Goebbels, who needs skilled movie practitioners to produce Nazi propaganda movie, and soon Pabst is on a slippery descent into hellish complicity. Adding fictional elements into a true skeleton of a story, the author creates a rattling tale that never eases, from before the war until well after. Kehlmann is a master at filmic (dare I say) switches of scene and character, and individual scenes are all varied and brilliant. An exploration of art and love amidst evil, the book is also a dark satire of tyranny and human failings. A final plot twist struck this reader as astonishingly startling and apt. The Director is a tour de force of a literary novel that reads like a thriller filled with foreboding.
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