Daniel Kehlmann

Broschiertes Buch

The Director

Beschreibung

New Statesman Fiction Book of the Year 2025 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 Translated 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.

Autor

Daniel Kehlmann was born in Munich in 1975 and lives in Vienna, Berlin and New York. He has published six novels: Measuring the World, Me & Kaminski, Fame, F, You Should Have Left and Tyll and has won numerous prizes, including the Candide Prize, the Literature Prize of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, the Doderer Prize, The Kleist Prize, the WELT Literature Prize, and the Thomas Mann Prize. Measuring the World was translated into more than forty languages and is one of the biggest successes in post-war German literature.

Zur Autorenwelt

Produktdetails

• Riverrun
• Verlag: Quercus Publishing Plc
• Seitenzahl: 352
• Erscheinungstermin: 12. Mai 2026
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 198mm x 129mm
• ISBN-13: 9781529435153
• ISBN-10: 1529435153
• Artikelnr.: 75547570

Rezensionen

"Kehlmann is really skillful about building the dread page by page....Kehlmann has a wicked sense of humor....so brilliant...I'm quite hot on this book....I read it in one day....I love this book."
-Joumana Khatib, The New York Times Book Review Podcast

"Haunting and darkly funny."
-Etan Nechin, Haaretz

"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."
-David Denby, The New Yorker

"The Director, Kehlmann's stunning tale of what failure

looks like, is a call to strengthen our spines."
-Susan Neiman, New York Review of Books

"A tasty subject for historical fiction...joins the pleasures of 'commercial' fiction with the moral weight of a novel of ideas."
-Maureen Corrigan, NPR's Fresh Air

"Powerful and timely."
-Jonathan Lemire, MSNBC'S Morning Joe

"Enthralling...thoroughly satisfying...both a vivid depiction of those circumstances and a captivating portrait of the artist navigating them."
-Malcolm Forbes, Washington Post

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

"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

"Taut, unflinching...sharply observed...incisive, sweeping...arresting."
-Lauren LeBlanc, Boston Globe

"[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

"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

"[Kehlmann] constructs a dark account of one man's descent into fascist complicity, a path strewn with surrealistic scenarios and chilling self-justifications in favor of art...Kehlmann's novel is purposefully unnerving and timely."
-Sarah Johnson, Booklist (starred review)

"Clear-eyed and propulsive...a searing look at the mechanics of complicity."
-Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"An incomparably accomplished and inventive piece of fiction by one of the most intelligent novelists at work today."
-Jeffrey Eugenides, author of Middlesex

"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

"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 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