Carina van Heyst (@time4reading.bsky.social)

time4reading on Instagram: "REFLECTIONS - The Director, Daniel Kehlmann (trans. Ross Benjamin)“Back then no one had imagined such a thing was possible—to be tr…" REFLECTIONS - The Director, Daniel Kehlmann (trans. Ross Benjamin)“Back then no one had imagined such a thing was possible—to be traveling through a world that had been peaceful for decades, having done nothing to anyone, innocent and unsuspecting, and suddenly to be arrested. Yes, such things were common today, but at the end of the long peace no one was prepared for it.”I am frequently late to the hype. Friends were reading and raving about Daniel Kehlmann’s The Director months ago but it was only recently (when I should have been concentrating on reading Midnight’s Children) that my Libby hold popped up and I chose to take a break from my big book and dive in. I definitely should have read this sooner.The Director tells the fictionalized story of real-life film director G.W. Pabst who returns to Austria to care for his elderly mother at exactly the wrong time. The borders close and he is soon drawn into working on films under the auspices of the Weimar Republic.As seems consistently the case, any exploration of the events of the rise of N*zism and the Second World War has much to say to us today. In this case, it’s a story, based on real people, that looks at it from inside. Whereas so many titles are based on the perspectives of the Allies and victims of the regime, in this case, we step inside and the view is chilling.From different angles, unreliable POVs, and fuzzy memories, Kehlmann makes us consider a lot of big moral and ethical questions. He explores the blurry line between art and propaganda: at what point does the former become the latter? He looks at how ego can make people willfully blind to anything (even terrible things) that would prevent them from achieving their goals. Most importantly he makes us confront the choices between resistance, self-preservation, and compliance.Initially intending to dip in and out of this alongside my big read, I found I could not put it down. In its trajectory from unsettling to horrifying, I could not look away. I’ll be shocked if this doesn’t turn up on the International Booker longlist in February. I know for sure it will be on my favourites list for this year. https://www.instagram.com/p/DSfbMvNERax/?igsh=bTF1aW00OTNtOG5o