In this novel inspired by G.W. Pabst, Leni Riefenstahl is among the bit players

Daniel Kehlmann’s latest novel, “The Director,” an engrossing meditation connected the exigencies of creation and the dangers of creator complicity, lands successful the United States astatine a bully time. Which is to say, a atrocious time, erstwhile some institutions and individuals indispensable gauge the risks of escaped look successful an progressively oppressive environment.

The German novelist astir precocious authored “Tyll,” shortlisted for the 2020 International Booker Prize, and his translator, Ross Benjamin, has rendered his caller humanities fabrication successful idiomatic English prose. With a page-turning communicative that is some technically blase and intellectually engaging, “The Director” sits astatine the charmed intersection of commercialized and literate fiction.

In his acknowledgments, Kehlmann says the caller was “largely inspired by the beingness stories of the humanities G.W. Pabst and his family.” Among his inventions is simply a Pabst son, Jakob, an aspiring creator turned Hitler Youth subordinate — idiosyncratic whose perceptions, erstwhile astute, are polluted by circumstances. The aforesaid tin beryllium said of Pabst himself, whose monomaniacal devotion to his creation inclines him to ugly compromises.

The politically tricky satellite of “The Director” is off-kilter successful a assortment of ways. (The German title, “Lichtspiel,” means some “play of light” and “film.”) Disorientation is simply a pervasive theme, opening with Pabst’s effort to found himself, on with different expatriate movie artists, successful Hollywood. But connection is simply a barrier, and the deference helium demands conflicts with the movie capital’s norms. Strangers confuse him with different Austrian-born director, Fritz Lang, and Pabst’s American movie, “A Modern Hero,” fashioned from a publication helium loathes, is simply a flop.

(S&S / Summit Books)

The director’s instrumentality to Austria, successful portion to assistance his aging mother, is poorly timed. (The book’s 3 sections are “Outside,” “Inside” and “After.”) At Pabst’s agrarian estate, the erstwhile submissive caretaker, Jerzabek, and his family, present Nazis, clasp the whip hand. The woman cooks comically inedible food; the daughters terrorize Jakob. The Pabst household is caught successful a real-life fearfulness movie from which flight proves difficult.

Trapped by the outbreak of war, Pabst agrees reluctantly to marque movies — well-funded and ostensibly nonpolitical — for the Third Reich. His nonrecreational unease is echoed by the novel’s mildly surreal bending of clip and abstraction and its metaphorical conflation of beingness and film.

The novel’s first-person, postwar framework involves different absurdist twist: Franz Wilzek, a nonmigratory of an Austrian sanatorium, is corralled into a unrecorded tv interview. Formerly a manager and, earlier, an adjunct to Pabst, Wilzek suffers from dementia, and the interrogation reveals his befuddlement. It is chopped abbreviated aft Wilzek denies the beingness of a mislaid Pabst film, “The Molander Case,” changeable successful World War II’s waning days. “Practically thing is known astir the circumstances of its shooting,” Kehlmann writes successful the acknowledgments. That humanities spread unleashes the novelist’s imagination.

Most of Kehlmann’s narration is successful the third-person, with perpetually shifting perspectives that adhd to the book’s off-kilter feel. At times we spot the enactment done Pabst’s eyes; astatine others, from the viewpoint of his wife, Trude; his son, Jakob; the histrion Greta Garbo; and the Reich envoy Kuno Krämer. A captured British writer offers his first-person instrumentality connected Pabst’s 1943 film, “Paracelsus.” Leni Riefenstahl turns up too, arsenic some histrion and director, a collaborator successful each sense. So, too, does the histrion Louise Brooks, depicted arsenic the large emotion of Pabst’s life.

Over time, dreamscapes, movie sets and Germany’s crumbling, war-ravaged cities go indistinguishable. In films, Pabst reflects, “the painted backgrounds looked existent and unreal astatine the aforesaid time, similar thing retired of the strangest dreams.” In Berlin, helium observes that “the edges of the houses seemed askew,” portion “the thoroughfare down beneath rolled distant precise consecutive into an endless distance,” evoking “how films had looked 15 years earlier.”

Similarly, erstwhile Pabst visits the Nazi propaganda ministry, its geometrically baffling corridors punctual him of “a instrumentality helium himself had utilized repeatedly successful agelong tracking shots.” When helium encounters the curate — an unnamed Joseph Goebbels — helium sees him concisely arsenic 2 chiseled men. As Pabst moves toward the exit, the bureau doorway recedes. He finds that “the country had folded implicit truthful that helium was suspended from the ceiling, walking upside down.”

The climactic (and amply foreshadowed) blurring of nightmare, movie and world occurs successful Prague, during “The Molander Case” shoot. A radical of prisoners, gaunt and starving, are commandeered to service arsenic unusually cooperative movie extras. A stunned Wilzek, spotting a acquainted face, reports that “time had go tangled similar a movie reel.”

Author Daniel Kehlmann.

(Heike Steinweg)

Kehlmann gives Pabst’s self-justifications their due. “The important happening is to marque creation nether the circumstances 1 finds oneself in,” the manager says. An histrion differs: “One contorts oneself thousands of times, but dies lone erstwhile … It’s simply not worthy it.” Later, Pabst declares, “Art is ever retired of place. Always unnecessary erstwhile it’s made. And later, erstwhile you look back, it’s the lone happening that mattered.”

Perception, and what 1 chooses not to see, is different 1 of the novel’s themes. “Look closely,” Jakob insists, “and the satellite recedes, becoming a substance successful which thing is cleanable and everything runs together.” But is that true? Wilzek, the novel’s improbable hero, does look closely, and what helium sees impels him to instrumentality a motivation stand.

Kehlmann’s epigraph, from the Austrian Nazi writer Heimito von Doderer’s 1966 abbreviated communicative postulation “Under Black Stars,” describes “drifting on connected a wide question of absurdity, though we knew and saw it.” But “this precise cognition was what kept america alive,” von Doderer writes, “while others acold amended than we were swallowed up.” A station facto reflection connected his times, it casts a troubling airy connected our own.

Klein is the Forward’s contributing publication critic.