The Director
Taut, unflinching ... Sharply observed ... Arresting ... Kehlmann’s mystery forcefully animates the cost — artistic and moral — of collaboration.
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Smartly entertaining ... Kehlmann freely adds secondary characters and carefully tampers with chronology ... Kehlmann also sprinkles his text with delicious hypotheticals ... A marvelous performance — not only supple, horrifying and mordantly droll, but fluidly translated and absolutely convincing.
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Exhilarating ... A sorrowful fable of artistic and moral collapse, but also a novel composed with entrancing freedom, even bravura ... Marvellously entertaining ... Admirably rendered by the translator Ross Benjamin, Kehlmann’s style is sober and matter of fact, the sentences straightforward, undecorated by colorful words or difficult syntax ... It’s hard to believe that The Director, while looking to the past, is not also meant as prophecy or, at least, as a warning ... Kehlmann creates a thrilling version of how the film was made and then a perverse and haunting account of what happened to it. He creates the passion to make art at whatever cost, even at the brink of exhaustion and madness.
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