“Director” review: the novel fills the gaps in the life of GW Pabst

Daniel Kehlmann's latest novel, “The Director”, a captivating meditation on the requirements of art and the dangers of artistic complicity, lands in the United States at a good time. That is to say a bad time, when institutions and individuals must assess the risks of free expression in an increasingly oppressive environment.

The German novelist recently wrote “Tyll”, Waised for the Booker International 2020 PrizeAnd its translator, Ross Benjamin, has returned his new historic fiction in an idiomatic English prose. With a rotating account that is both technically sophisticated and intellectually engaging, “the director” is at the charmed intersection of commercial and literary fiction.

In his thanks, Kehlmann says that the novel was “largely inspired by the life stories of the Historical Gw Pabst and his family”. Among his inventions is a Pabst son, Jakob, a budding artist who has become a member of the youth Hitler – someone whose perception, once clever, is polluted by circumstances. The same can be said of Pabst itself, whose monomaniacal devotion to its art inclines it to ugly compromise.

The politically delicate world of “the director” is shifted in various ways. (The German title, “Lichtspiel”, means both “Play of Light” and “film”.) Disorientation is an omnipresent theme, starting with the attempted Pabst to settle, as well as other expatriate film artists in Hollywood. But language is a barrier, and the deference it requires is in conflict with the standards of the film capital. Foreigners confuse him with another director of Austrian origin, Fritz Lang, and the American film of Pabst, “A Modern Hero”, shaped from a script he hates, is a flop.

The return of the director to Austria, in part to help his aging mother, is poorly timed. (The three sections of the book are “outside”, “inside” and “after”.) In the rural field of Pabst, the formerly submissive goalkeeper, Jerzabek, and his family, now the Nazis, hold the lash. The woman cooks comic dishes non -edible; The girls terrorize Jakob. The Pabst family is taken in a real horror film from which Escape is difficult.

Trapped by the start of the war, Pabst reluctantly agrees to make films – well funded and ostensibly non -political – for the third Reich. His professional discomfort is taken over by the flexion and slowly surreal space of the novel and its metaphorical confusion of life and film.

The first person in the novel, the post-war frame, implies another absurd torsion: Franz Wilzek, a resident of an Austrian sanatorium, is integrated into a live television interview. Formerly director and, earlier, Pabst assistant, Wilzek ​​suffers from dementia, and the interview reveals his confession. It is interrupted after Wilzek ​​denies the existence of a lost Pabst film, “The Molander Case”, shot in the decreasing days of the Second World War. “Virtually nothing is known on the circumstances of his shooting,” writes Kehlmann in thanks. This historical gap triggers the imagination of the novelist.

Most of Kehlmann's narration is in the third person, with constant prospects that add to the disabled sensation of the book. Sometimes we see the action through the Pabst eyes; from others, from his wife's point of view, Trude; his son, Jakob; Actor Greta Garbo; And the Reich Kuno Krämer's envoy. A captured British writer offers his first -person vision of the 1943 Pabst film, “Paracelsus”. Leni Riefenstahl also appears, as an actor and director, a collaborator in all directions. The same goes for actor Louise Brooks, described as the great love of Pabst's life.

Over time, the landscapes of dreams, filming platforms and ruined cities in ruin and ravaging war become indistinguishable. In the films, Pabst reflects: “The painted history seemed real and unreal at the same time, as something of the strangest dreams.” In Berlin, he observes that “the edges of the houses seemed standing”, while “the street below took place very directly in an endless distance”, evoking “how the films looked fifteen years earlier”.

Likewise, when Pabst visits the Nazi ministry of propaganda, his geometrically confusing corridors remind him of “something he had himself used several times in long follow-up shots”. When he meets the minister – an unnamed Joseph Goebbels – he briefly sees him as two distinct men. While Pabst moves to the exit, the office door is retreating. He notes that “the room had folded to suspend from the ceiling, walking down.”

The culmination (and amply foreshadowing) of the nightmare, the film and reality occurs in Prague, during the shooting of “The Molander Case”. A group of prisoners, emaciated and hungry, is requisitioned to serve as extras of unusually cooperative films. An amazed Wilzek, identifying a familiar face, reports that “time had become tangled like a film coil”.

Author Daniel Kehlmann.

(Heike Steinweg)

Kehlmann gives Pabst the self-adjusting their due. “The important thing is to make art in the circumstances in which in which is found,” explains the director. An actor differs: “We contain thousands of times, but only dies once … it simply does not worth it.” Later, Pabst declares: “Art is always out of words. Always useless when it is done. And later, when you look back, it's the only thing that was counting. ”

Perception, and what we choose not to see, is another of the themes of the novel. “Look carefully,” insists Jakob, “and the world is backing up, becoming a mixture in which nothing is clean and everything happens together.” But is it true? Wilzek, the unlikely hero of the novel, looks closely, and what he sees prevents him from taking a moral position.

Kehlmann's epigraph, from the Austrian Nazi writer's collection of news Heimito Von Doderer, “Under Black Stars”, describes “deriving on a wide wave of absurdity, although we know and saw him”. But “this very knowledge was what kept us alive,” wrote Von Doder, “while others much better than we swallowed”. A post-facto reflection on her time, she throws a disturbing light by ourselves.

Klein is the critic of the attacker's book.