The Director

by Daniel Kehlmann (trans. from the German by Ross Benjamin) ($28.99, hardcover), available to order online here or call the store, 505-988-4226)

Review by Kirk Ellis, two-time Emmy Award and two-time Humanitas Prize–winning writer/producer who wrote and produced the acclaimed event series John Adams

Good novels about movies and moviemaking are exceedingly few -- in general, the results tend to be mediocre at best. Great novels on the subject are practically non-existent. One thinks of F. Scott Fitzgerald's unfinished The Last Tycoon and Nathanael West's Day of the Locust at the top of an all-too-abbreviated shortlist. Daniel Kehlmann's The Director now joins that rarefied company. Already acclaimed as one of the best books of 2025 by the New York Times, the Economist, and The New Yorker, Kehlmann's thoroughly researched, brilliantly imagined account of genius tested by totalitarianism is at once a page-turning thriller and a chillingly contemporary cautionary tale.

Kehlmann takes as his subject the story of legendary emigre German director G.W. Pabst (best known for Pandora's Box), who flees Thirties Hollywood in the wake of the flop of his first English-language film and finds himself and his family trapped inside the Third Reich on the outbreak of World War II. Persuaded to apply his talents to the cause of the Third Reich, Pabst convinces himself he can remain above ideology -- that the only dictatorship worth following is that of Art -- only to suffer the physical and psychological costs that compromise requires.

This is a "cinematic" novel in the best sense. The author's great achievement is to find a narrative equivalent to the German Expressionist films that made Pabst's reputation. Like Fitzgerald and West, who both labored in the Hollywood trenches and wrote their novels from an inside perspective, Kehlmann perfectly captures the absurdity of living in a fantasy world that can very quickly become indistinguishable from reality. At once mordant, hilarious, cynical and outright hallucinatory (think the Coen Bros.' Barton Fink), The Director more than validates its universal acclaim.