The Director by Daniel Kehlmann
Published 2023 · 352 pages · 120,000 words · about 8 hours at an average pace · Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction, Biographical Fiction
How hard is The Director to read?
The Director scores 62 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 48 out of 100
- Ross Benjamin's translation renders Kehlmann's prose in clear, controlled literary English, with period texture from Weimar-era film jargon and Nazi bureaucratic language rather than obscure or invented vocabulary. It reads closer to the accessible elegance of The Great Gatsby than to anything demanding a glossary.
- Sentence structure: 55 out of 100
- Kehlmann's signature move is sliding from third-person narration into a character's free indirect thought within the same paragraph, sometimes the same sentence, without warning. Sentences stay grammatically clean, but tracking whose perception is in control takes sustained attention.
- Abstraction: 52 out of 100
- The novel keeps its ideas about complicity and self-deception embedded in concrete scenes — a film shoot, a dinner table, a meeting with Goebbels — rather than in essayistic digression. The philosophy surfaces through dialogue and irony, not lecture.
- Information density: 60 out of 100
- Three timelines (Hollywood in 1933, occupied Austria, wartime Prague) carry real historical figures, invented family members, and film-industry detail simultaneously. Readers track who is documented fact and who is Kehlmann's invention throughout.
- Narrative indirection: 62 out of 100
- The novel withholds authorial judgment on Pabst, letting his rationalizations stand largely unchallenged in the narration itself; readers must infer his moral position from what surrounds him — his wife's silences, his son's choices, the camera's demands. Comparable to how Nick Carraway's bias shapes Gatsby.
- Symbolic density: 58 out of 100
- Cinema itself becomes the book's central figure — a state 'perfectly suited for cinema,' propaganda and film production as mirror images of each other. The lost reel of Der Fall Molander, vanished on a train, stands in for the erasure of moral reckoning.
- Ironic distance: 72 out of 100
- Kehlmann applies a dry, often very funny wit to a story of atrocity and self-betrayal, holding sympathy for Pabst and indictment of him in view at once. Reviewers repeatedly note the book balancing comedy against catastrophe, a gap wider than Gatsby's and closer to the deadpan cruelty of The Sellout.
- Resolution withholding: 68 out of 100
- The film at the story's center is historically lost, and Kehlmann keeps it lost — it disappears on a train before anyone can watch it and judge Pabst by it. The 'After' section that follows offers no clean verdict on his guilt, leaving the reader to render one.
- Structural complexity: 65 out of 100
- The novel is built in three named parts — Outside, Inside, After — spanning three decades, shifting among Hollywood, an Austrian castle, and the Prague studio, and framed by an incident involving Pabst's former assistant Franz Wilzek years after Pabst's death.
How The Director is regarded
The Director holds a literary regard score of 59 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.