Point of View

The novel's shifting perspective makes complicity and memory feel unstable, because no single consciousness can hold the whole story without distortion. It opens in a direct, anxious first person as an elderly film worker is pulled out of institutional routine and forced into public speech on television, and that voice later returns in old age, so the reader experiences the past as something that keeps resurfacing rather than something that can be neatly told. Much of the central narrative then moves into close third person around Pabst, Trude, and Jakob, giving the reader access to private calculations while still keeping motives partly opaque.

Kehlmann uses additional focal characters to expose the gap between public roles and private experience. A chapter can pivot from the claustrophobic domestic terror of Dreiturm to the guarded interior life of a celebrated actress, or to the cool practicality of an...