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    Mr. Wilder and Me
    Mr. Wilder and Me
    Mr. Wilder and Me
    Ebook270 pages5 hours

    Mr. Wilder and Me

    By Jonathan Coe

    4/5

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    A NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE

    FROM THE AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR OF THE ROTTERS’ CLUB AND MIDDLE ENGLAND

    In the heady summer of 1977, a naïve young woman called Calista sets out from Athens to venture into the wider world. On a Greek island that has been turned into a film set, she finds herself working for the famed Hollywood director Billy Wilder, about whom she knows almost nothing. But the time she spends in this glamorous, unfamiliar new life will change her for good.

    While Calista is thrilled with her new adventure, Wilder himself is living with the realization that his star may be on the wane. Rebuffed by Hollywood, he has financed his new film with German money, and when Calista follows him to Munich for the shooting of further scenes, she finds herself joining him on a journey of memory into the dark heart of his family history.

    In a novel that is at once a tender coming-of-age story and an intimate portrait of one of cinema’s most intriguing figures, Jonathan Coe turns his gaze on the nature of time and fame, of family and the treacherous lure of nostalgia. When the world is catapulting towards change, do you hold on for dear life or decide it's time to let go?

    “Outstanding... In a sense, the novel toward which Coe’s fiction has always been heading.”—Los Angeles Review of Books

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherEuropa Editions
    Release dateSep 27, 2022
    ISBN9781609457938
    Author

    Jonathan Coe

    Jonathan Coe was born in Birmingham in 1961. An award-winning novelist, biographer and critic, his novels include What a Carve Up! (which won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the French Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger), The House of Sleep (which won the Writers' Guild Best Fiction Award), The Rotters’ Club and The Closed Circle . He is also the author of the highly acclaimed biography of the novelist B. S. Johnson, Like A Fiery Elephant. He lives in London.

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    Reviews for Mr. Wilder and Me

    4/5

    49 ratings4 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Not one of his characteristic state of the nation novels this time but Mr Wilder & Me still has plenty of typical Jonathan Coe themes and trademarks. There’s the fusing of fact and fiction, the strong storytelling plus formal innovations, the humour tinged with melancholy. Music and film have long been inspirations for Coe and so they are again. Fifty something film composer Calista is at a crisis point in her life. Her music isn’t in the demand it once was and her children are leaving home. This is the framing device Coe uses for the story of how the young and naive Calista found herself, almost by accident, as an assistant on the set of Billy Wilder’s penultimate film Fedora, the story of an old and faded film star, in 1977.When Wilder made that film he was no longer the king of Hollywood he had once been. He and his style of filmmaking were being superseded by a new type of film and a new generation of filmmakers- Coppola, Scorsese, Spielberg. Mr Wilder & Me is at once a coming of age and coming of old age novel. It’s about being young and finding your way in the world and being old and finding the world no longer wants what you have to offer. Although ostensibly about Billy Wilder this book feels very personal - the ‘Me’ of the title could as easily be Coe as Calista. When Wilder talks about the value of entertainment, of wanting his films to be serious but also give the audience ‘some little spark’ they didn’t have before, it could be Coe talking about his own novel. Any one of his novels, in fact. Towards the end of the novel Calista tells Wilder she thinks Fedora will be a ‘very… compassionate film’. Mr Wilder & Me is certainly a compassionate novel. Like all of Coe’s best work it carries it’s seriousness lightly. Warm, touching and deeply humane, it’s a gift of love from Coe to Wilder and the reader.
    • 5/5
      This is a charming novel which centres on a young Greek woman, Calista, who happens to be invited to a dinner with Billy Wilder and his screenwriter as a friend of a family friend. She is young, on holiday on the West Coast of California, and has no real idea of who he is. Wilder is in the autumn years of his career and they connect again when he is shooting a movie on a Greek island and Calista is asked to work on the set as an interpreter and translator. She is kept on as a PA/general dogsbody when the shooting transfers to Munich and this coming of age story is intertwined with a portrait of Wilder, his career on the wane, reminiscing about earlier times in his pomp. The lightest of touch is skilfully applied and it’s a book to whisk you away to different times in a welcome way.
    • 5/5
      What happens when what you want to give, no one really wants anymore? Fortunately, this is not a problem that Mr Coe himself needs to face, as this a perfectly imagined and executed meditation on the waning, not some much of fame, but the perceived value of your contributions. Billy Wilder attempts to make a defining, serious, film Fedora, that even he knows, the world is not interested in; times have moved on. Calista, in middle age is facing a world that no longer wants her film scores and daughters that no longer need her parenting. This is a perfectly imagined and realised miniature of Calista's coming of age story whilst being recruited, through a series of fairly unlikely coincidences - but hey, the plots of most films hang on unlikely coincidences - to be the Greek translators of Billy Wilder and crew as they shoot Fedora in Corfu. Through Calista's eyes, Coe brings Billy Wilder, his scriptwriter I.A.L Diamond and their cast and crew vividly to life. Wilder in his artistic decline is driven by a passion to finish this one last film (which in fact turned out not to be) and is in turn, melancholy, resigned and in the main, extremely funny. The monologues on the films Jaws and Despair are memorably acerbicYou don't have to know the film Fedora to like this - myself, I have never seen it. Nor do you need to be familiar with Mr Wilder's work in general. But you do need to be able to put yourselves in the shoes of someone who is facing the prospect of what to do, when the major opportunities of life seemed to have passed by. Perhaps that's many of us. It's highly recommended
    • 2/5
      I had high hopes for this novel, having greatly enjoyed several of Jonathan Coe’s previous books. There was, however, a slight cloud of doubt on the horizon because there have been a couple of books by him that I disliked.The basic premise is intriguing in itself, and takes the reader in to territory that Coe has trodden before. In his earlier novels, What a Carve Up and its sequel, Eleven, he demonstrated his enjoyment of vintage British films. He is back in similar subject matter here, although this time it is on Fedora, on of Billy Wilder’s later and lesser known films, that he hangs his story.I am not familiar with Fedora, but I don’t know if that matters particularly – the film is really just a vector through which the characters of Billy Wilder and his associates are introduced. The book takes the form of recollections of a woman looking back upon her unexpected encounters with Billy Wilder, Having met him more or less by chance, she was engaged to act as a translator for him and his crew while they filmed on one of the Greek islands.To be honest, I completely failed to engage with this novel, and was left wondering why I had bother ed with it. A forgettable book about a forgettable film.

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    Mr. Wilder and Me - Jonathan Coe

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