The Director

Reviews / Votes

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 * 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 * Sunday Times (Pick of the Month) * Daniel Kehlmann's engrossing seventh novel, The Director, proves his mastery of the historical form in reconceiving the life of G. W. Pabst. * The Telegraph * A compelling narrative . . . that combines darkness and humour as it traces Pabst's descent into ever nastier places as he chases cinematic glory * Financial Times * 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. * New Yorker * Wonderful . . . one of the best novels of the year * New European * 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 * Kehlmann is a master . . . moral compromises lie at the heart of this superbly imagined novel * Mail on Sunday * 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 * RTE Guide * The Director has all the darkness, shapeshifting ambiguity and glittering unease of a modern Grimms' fairytale: it is Kehlmann's best work yet. * Guardian * Less a poet and more an architect, [Kehlmann] constructs over the course of this novel an unvarnished and unmistakable sense of impending doom . . . magnificent * TLS * Darkly comic * FT (Best Summer Books of 2025) * Blending fact and fiction, this tale is a study of art and complicity * The Economist (Best Novels in the Second Quarter of 2025) * [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 * Jewish Chronicle * 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 * Sunday Times * 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 * RTE Guide (Summer Reads 2025) * Engrossing and disturbing by turns, it proves [Kehlmann's] mastery of the historical form * Telegraph (The Greatest Books of 2025) * Arguably the best study of an artist corroded by fascism since Klaus Mann's Mephisto * Richard Flanagan (TLS, Books of the Year 2025) * Kehlmann turns Pabst's real-life dilemma into a full-blooded, entertaining epic * Guardian (Best Translated Fiction 2025) * 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. * New York Times (Best Books of 2025) * 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 * Observer (2025 Books of the Years) * A superb novel * Ian Buruma (New Statesman Books of the Year 2025) * Gripping . . . It marries compelling narrative with a necessary examination of complicity * Erica Wagner (New Statesman Books of the Year 2025) *