Not a romantic love story, but something more tender and rare: a charming, ironic fairy tale about an accidental, intergenerational friendship... A gem of a novel.”—Washington Post
★ “Beautifully written and full of wisdom, this unusual and fascinating book contains many treats... If you love novels set in the world of moviemaking, this is as good as the best of them.”—Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)
“English author Coe (Middle England) offers a witty elegy for the last gasp of old Hollywood....Coe brings great sympathy to his touching depiction of an older artist fighting to remain relevant. Coe’s fans will fall for this one.”—Publishers Weekly
“Outstanding... In a sense, Mr. Wilder and Me is the novel toward which Coe’s fiction has always been heading.”—Los Angeles Review of Books
“A beautifully elegiac novel… One of the best movie-set novels, it sticks closely to the facts but turns them into an elegant, melancholy reflection on Wilder’s escape from Germany, his return to Berlin, and the troubled production of his late-career film maudit.”—A. S. Hamrah, Bookforum
“Beautifully written and filled with compassion, humor and an abundance of knowledge about old Hollywood, Mr. Wilder and Me sheds light on lives that aren’t perfect but still well lived.”—Bookpage
“Life-affirming, genuinely affecting, sublime, Mr. Wilder and Me is a joy to read.”—NOW Toronto
“Part Hollywood biopic, part Holocaust memoir, part middle-class domestic drama. What holds [Mr. Wilder and Me] together is the hard kernel of historical fact at its core.”—The New York Times Book Review
“Coe has worked wonders and produced one of the finest novels of his career... It chronicles an evocative and formative summer, and it serves up a captivating portrait of an artist... this one is a delight.”—Washington Examiner
“It’s just a really warm and wonderful and fun and happy book, you love the characters and you have this big sigh of satisfaction when you finish it.”—NPR WSOR
“A gauzy, glittery and wistful paean to two of Old Hollywood’s brightest bulbs as well as a disarmingly frank look at the way status can unjustly diminish with age.”—Shelf Awareness
“Satisfyingly sweeping…among Coe’s best…A love letter to the spirit of cinema.”—The Guardian
“A warm and funny coming-of-age tale.”—Christopher Schobert, The Film Stage
“An account of Billy Wilder’s later years that sweeps beautifully from Hollywood to Greece and London while all the time reflecting on the horrors of 20th-century Europe.”—Financial Times (Best Books of the Year)
“This elegiac novella is utterly charming, deeply poignant and ultimately uplifting.”—Mail on Sunday
“A satisfyingly sweeping novel that still manages to push the form in new directions. As good as anything he's written—a novel to cherish.”—Observer
“Brilliantly funny.”—The Economist
“Superb.”—The Times
“Very, very funny.”—Stylist
“Knowledgeably enthralled by cinema, Jonathan Coe has often spliced it inventively into his fiction. This richly enjoyable novel is entirely devoted to it. The career of one of Hollywood's greatest directors is unrolled with wit and enthusiasm tinged with melancholy.”—The Sunday Times (Best Fiction Books of the Year)
“One of my favourite writers…a thoughtful, tender read.”—Good Housekeeping
“A beautiful, bittersweet novel that is itself crying out for the silver screen treatment...sheer delight.”—Scotsman
“A tender portrait. Coe's close-up on Wilder doesn't just celebrate the man but embodies his glorious ability to say sad things in a funny way, and vice versa.”—Daily Telegraph
“History meets fiction in this absorbing read...A nostalgic look at a girl coming of age and a man dealing with age, evocatively written.”—Woman's Own
“Mr. Wilder and Me is a homage to the great film director and producer, Billy Wilder...Cinephiles will find this account a diverting companion.”—New York Journal of Books
★ 2022-06-22
A 50-something film composer meditates on the summer of 1977, when she worked with director Billy Wilder on one of his last films.
As her own daughters prepare to leave home, Calista Frangopoulou, born in Athens, now living in Britain, thinks of the backpacking trip she took at 21 to the United States. A friend she made on her way west invited her along to a dinner in Hollywood arranged by her father. As it turned out, their companions were Billy Wilder, who owned the restaurant; his wife, Audrey; his writing partner, Iz Diamond; and Iz's wife, Barbara. Though the girls were wildly underdressed and totally out of their depth, and though the friend absconded halfway through the meal and the Wilders had to have the drunken Calista sleep on their couch, she made such an impression that she was brought on to be their interpreter when they went to film Fedora in Greece the following year, then continued on during shooting in Germany and France. There is so much to enjoy about this book, which is rooted in extensive research about Wilder's life and the making of Fedora, including the recollections of someone who actually lived a version of this experience—and yet it reads like a fairy tale. Calista forms deep relationships with both Billy and Iz and changes from a naïve know-nothing to someone with a deep understanding of the impact of World War II on a generation of artists. "I realized that for a man like him, a man who was essentially melancholy...humour was not just a beautiful thing but a necessary thing, that the telling of a good joke could bring a moment, transient but lovely, when life made a rare kind of sense, and would no longer seem random and chaotic and unknowable." She also finds along the way the inspiration for her own future career as a composer of film scores. Beautifully written and full of wisdom, this unusual and fascinating book contains many treats, including a miniscreenplay done in Wilder's style and an unforgettable scene in which Calista and Billy sample Brie de Meaux on a French farm where it is made.
If you love novels set in the world of moviemaking, this is as good as the best of them.
