The publisher provides the following statement about the accessibility of the EPUB file supplied to OverDrive. Experiences may vary across reading systems. After borrowing the book, you may download the EPUB files to read in another reading system.
A publication with images and logos, converted to meet EPUB Accessibility specifications of WCAG-AA level. This book contains various accessibility features such as alternative text for images and logos, table of contents, page-list, landmark, reading order, structural navigation, and semantic structure. Blank pages from print have been removed in this ebook, with related page number spans set on the first following in-spine page. Certain front and back matter pages have been adjusted in the reading order sequence from print, with related page references reordered in the page-list order.
No information about appearance modifiability is available.
Not all of the content will be readable as read aloud speech or dynamic braille.
Has alternative text descriptions for images.
The publication contains a conformance statement that it meets the EPUB Accessibility and WCAG 2 Level AA standard.
This publication claims to meet EPUB Accessibility 1.1 WCAG 2.2 Level AA.
Table of contents to all chapters of the text via links.
Elements such as headings, tables, etc for structured navigation.
Page breaks included
High contrast between text and background
April 1, 2025
Smarting after a Hollywood flop, Austrian-born director G. W. Pabst, a Weimar cinema pioneer, returned to Europe. Trapped in Austria while visiting his mother when WWII broke out, he became enmeshed in Goebbels' propaganda machine. Kehlmann (Tyll, 2020) uses this outline to construct a dark account of one man's descent into fascist complicity, a path strewn with surrealistic scenarios and chilling self-justifications in favor of art. The perspective shifts with each chapter, which keeps readers hyper-focused on each nightmarish step. The family's Nazi-sympathizing caretaker at their Austrian home tyrannizes them. Pabst's son, Jakob, begins bullying others. Pabst's despairing wife, Trude, reluctantly joins an oppressive book club. Ambitious yet passive, Pabst voices objections to working for the Reich but soon falls into line. "But once you get used to it and know the rules," a colleague tells him, "you feel almost free." The beginning foreshadows a mystery about his making of the film, The Molander Case, and the reveal is shocking. While it takes many fictional liberties, Kehlmann's novel is purposefully unnerving and timely.
COPYRIGHT(2025) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Starred review from June 1, 2025
A freely imagined conjuring of the life and career of celebrated German-language film director G.W. Pabst by one of Germany's boldest contemporary novelists. Pabst, an Austrian, first got involved in the arts while being held in a French prison camp during World War I. He formed a theater group there, then made his reputation with the silent filmsThe Joyless Street, starring Greta Garbo, andPandora's Box, starring his forever infatuation Louise Brooks. Taking his pioneering cutting technique to Hollywood, he has his ideas brushed aside by producers who, paying little mind to his lofty reputation, force him into taking on a flimsy project that is dead on arrival. Even with World War II going on, he returns to Europe, where he makes shameless compromises with Nazi authorities to get his films financed. Desperate to finish what he considers his masterpiece, The Molander Case, before the advancing Red Army can shut everything down, he throws all caution to the wind. But his "sparklingly modern" work, based on a pulp novel, gets lost on a train--and lost to history, leading to debates over whether it ever existed. Sticklers for biographical accuracy may quibble over Kehlmann's inventions and rewriting of history. But the sheer wizardry and audacity of the storytelling, which masterfully dances along the cusp of realism and surrealism, comedy and tragedy, deflates those objections. Scene after scene amazes, including one where the Nazi-sworn caretakers of Pabst's Austrian castle (where his discombobulated mother resides) banish his family to the basement and another displaying Pabst's ghoulish use of gaunt, war-depleted soldiers to fill concert hall seats for a crucial scene inMolander. All in all, an amazing performance by Kehlmann, who as a bonus immerses us in the filmmaking process. A wickedly entertaining, eye-opening book.
COPYRIGHT(2025) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.