Daniel Kehlmann, _The Director_, trans. Ross Benjamin

 FIRST NOVEL I have ever read by Daniel Kehlmann, but it won't be the last. Brilliant writer. 

The Director depicts the bad luck and worse choices of G. W. Pabst, legendary German film director of the silent era (Pandora's Box, et al.). When the Nazis take power, Pabst takes his wife and young son to Hollywood, figuring he can make the transition á la Fritz Lang and F. W. Murnau. Unfortunately, he gets assigned only mediocre projects over which he has only limited control. Disappointed, he takes wife and son back to Europe, figuring he can do something closer to what he wants to do in Switzerland or France. However, they are in Germany visiting his aging and ailing mother when the war starts, and they can't get out. As soon as the Nazis discover the great Pabst is back in Germany, they swiftly recruit him to make films--the films he wants to make, of course, within reason, but naturally he wants his films to be suitable for the New Germany, doesn't he? Doesn't he? Hmm?

What kind of compromise, how many compromises, are you willing to make to pursue your vocation? In Pabst's case, as imagined by Kehlmann, the answers are "any kind" and "as many as it takes."

Being a film director, Pabst is in a situation more like an architect's than a writer's. A writer could just keep writing whatever he felt called to write, but keep it all in a drawer, waiting for things to change. Making a film, though, like raising a building, requires capital, materials, expensive equipment, and people with highly specialized skills. Anyone with a phone and editing software could make a crude movie now, perhaps, but Pabst had no such options. In the 1940s, you need real resources to make films. And so the Faustian bargain was made, with the usual results.

So, a morally serious novel, and a historical novel that economically and vividly evokes another era, but what really struck me is how versatile Kehlmann is in handling point of view. The chapters often give us Pabst's point of view--most memorably, I'd say, in his interview with a shape-shifting Goebbels who seems able to be in two places at once as well as to say two very different things at the same time. But we also have a chapter in which Pabst's wife has to navigate a Nazi book club, another in which his son has to stay on the right side of his school's Hitler Youth, and a couple (which open and close the book), set in the 1960s or 70s, in which Pabst's cinematographer, succumbing to Alzheimer's, accepts an invitation to appear on a TV talk show and answer questions about his old boss. Kehlmann's ability to click from one character's perspective to another's dazzles.

The chapter that took the cake for me was from the point of view of P. G. Wodehouse (unnamed but easily recognizable), who, in the middle of making his own compromises with the devil, meets Pabst at a film premiere.