Geordie Williamson

And later, when you look back, it's the only thing that mattered.

So he's making a gamble, based, I think, in some sense on Lenny's own kind of efforts, that if he makes the art in the future...

people will look back and not remember the other side of it.

But when we get Pabst himself using, at the very end of the novel and at the end of his career and at the end of his sanity, I would say, a concentration camp people, figures in Prague, outside of Prague, in order to swell the numbers of a scene that absolutely must be pulled off if he's going to make this movie.

you can see that his own degradation has been complete.

And the fact that it's all framed within a novel kind of blows my mind in some way.

Are we supposed to say that the art is the thing that wins in the end or is this moral degradation that he's suffered the thing that is basically that art has entombed forever more now?

Look, I'm interested in the fact that this man who'd written sort of five novels before he was 30 and had written, I don't know what, seven before he wrote this one,

He waited until he was in his 50s to actually deal with that era in German history, a guy whose father was in a work camp.

So I think he was basically saying, I really need to be on my mettle.

I need to be mature enough and sure enough in my material to handle this.

So I think that there's great sense of moral responsibility and ethical responsibility.

decency being wielded here but it's being wielded really lightly it's wrapped in irony and so you and i laugh cassie but as you're laughing you're feeling very uneasy yeah yeah there's so many heartbreaking moments that are just yeah tragedy upon tragedy yeah and that is daniel kalman's the director translated from the german by ross benjamin and published by river run

I think she's written pretty close to the present, particularly in recent novels.

I think she started off a little bit sort of further back, but I think that history has forced itself upon her characters, I think,

And history is happening to Americans right now.

So I think that's where the urgency lies.

But it's interesting, isn't it?

She manages to do it without, as Robert says, editorializing.

It just seems to unfold as part of the daily reality of their particular patch of the U.S.