Yes, Kehlmann brilliantly recreates the ww2 period in Europe and the moral dilemmas facing the artist..in this case..a film director. But, in my opinion, he fails to bring to life G.W. Pabst and the surrounding characters. Pabst et al function more to bring the period and dilemmas to life than as people one gets to know and cares about. Additionally, there were times when I was confused as to who the first person character was, the time period and place. Of course, this may be intentional on the author's part. . Since I am a film buff I was totally fascinated by the detailed sections dealing with film making. But, a
non-film buff may decide to skip these sections. Needless to say my recommendations will contain all of the foregoing caveats.

Daniel Kehlmann's new novel is a dark and moving portrait of the famous Austrian filmmaker G.W. Pabst (1895-1967), about a lost film and about working as an artist under an authoritarian regime, told in cinematic language. If you are interested in the history of cinema, this is fascinating.

The opening chapter of the book, a flash forward, is one of the most intriguing I ever read: years after Pabst's death, an elderly and forgetful former assistant of his is interviewed for Austrian television, about his cooperation with Pabst during the war. He unexpectedly gets a question about the film 'Der Fall Molander' which was shot in Prague under difficult circumstances in the final months of the war. The film is lost, but the assistant vehemently insists it was never shot.

Then we go back in time to the 1930s and the focus shifts to Pabst, who had first escaped Nazi Germany to Hollywood (like Fritz Lang and other colleagues) but makes a terrible miscalculation and moves back to the Reich for family reasons. He ends up trapped there when the war starts.

The book has everything I love from Daniel Kehlmann: an original historical topic (I always wonder how he comes up with his topics), smart dialogue (I had to laugh often despite the disturbing circumstances), a good plot to get immersed in (much of it invented I suspect, because it is a novel, not a biography) and raising interesting moral questions. Tyll will remain my personal favourite, but this is an incredible novel too.

And now starts a period of another 3-4 years of waiting for his next...