The director A novel

Smarting after a Hollywood flop, Austrian-born director G. W. Pabst, a Weimar cinema pioneer, returned to Europe. Trapped in Austria while visiting his mother when WWII broke out, he became enmeshed in Goebbels' propaganda machine. Kehlmann (Tyll, 2020) uses this outline to construct 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. The perspective shifts with each chapter, which keeps readers hyper-focused on each nightmarish step. The family's Nazi-sympathizing caretaker at their Austrian home tyrannizes them. Pabst's son, Jakob, begins bullying others. Pabst's despairing wife, Trude, reluctantly joins an oppressive book club. Ambitious yet passive, Pabst voices objections to working for the Reich but soon falls into line. "But once you get used to it and know the rules," a colleague tells him, "you feel almost free." The beginning foreshadows a mystery about his making of the film, The Molander Case, and the reveal is shocking. While it takes many fictional liberties, Kehlmann's novel is purposefully unnerving and timely.

Tyll author Kehlmann offers a clear-eyed and propulsive chronicle of Austrian filmmaker G.W. Pabst (1885--1967), whose achievements included launching the careers of Greta Garbo and Louise Brooks before he reluctantly collaborated with the Nazis. As an expat in 1930s Hollywood, Pabst enjoys a reputation as a gifted artist and is eager to continue working. His latest idea is a parable for the rise of fascism in Europe, but his pitch doesn't sell, and he's reduced to making a superficial romance. He returns to his native Austria with his wife and their son after learning that his mother's health has declined. But the homecoming is an unpleasant one, as the Nazis have just taken over. Pressure on Pabst escalates after Germany invades Poland and he's summoned to Berlin, where he's coerced into making propaganda films. Though he survives WWII, his reputation is stained by his complicity with the Nazis. Kehlmann is especially effective at illustrating the ease with which people accept the realities of living in a violent police state. As one of Pabst's colleagues puts it to him, "You have to be extremely careful not to say anything wrong, even more so since the beginning of the war. But once you get used to it and know the rules, you feel almost free." It's a searing look at the mechanics of complicity. Agent: Peter Straus, RCW Literary. (May)

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. Pabst, an Austrian, first got involved in the arts while being held in a French prison camp during World War I. He formed a theater group there, then made his reputation with the silent filmsThe Joyless Street, starring Greta Garbo, andPandora's Box, starring his forever infatuation Louise Brooks. Taking his pioneering cutting technique to Hollywood, he has his ideas brushed aside by producers who, paying little mind to his lofty reputation, force him into taking on a flimsy project that is dead on arrival. Even with World War II going on, he returns to Europe, where he makes shameless compromises with Nazi authorities to get his films financed. Desperate to finish what he considers his masterpiece,The Molander Case, before the advancing Red Army can shut everything down, he throws all caution to the wind. But his "sparklingly modern" work, based on a pulp novel, gets lost on a train--and lost to history, leading to debates over whether it ever existed. Sticklers for biographical accuracy may quibble over Kehlmann's inventions and rewriting of history. But the sheer wizardry and audacity of the storytelling, which masterfully dances along the cusp of realism and surrealism, comedy and tragedy, deflates those objections. Scene after scene amazes, including one where the Nazi-sworn caretakers of Pabst's Austrian castle (where his discombobulated mother resides) banish his family to the basement and another displaying Pabst's ghoulish use of gaunt, war-depleted soldiers to fill concert hall seats for a crucial scene inMolander. All in all, an amazing performance by Kehlmann, who as a bonus immerses us in the filmmaking process. A wickedly entertaining, eye-opening book. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.