BookJack talks about the book Mr. Wilder and Me by British author Jonathan Coe. The novel is dedicated to the director Billy Wilder, a representative of the "golden age" of Hollywood. In Russia, he is known primarily for the picture "In a Jazz Only Girls" with Marilyn Monroe. The writer has been inspired by Wilder's work for many years, and he confesses his love for him in his new novel.
Jonathan Coe, born 19 August 1961 in Birmingham, is a British novelist and writer. His work usually has an underlying preoccupation with political issues, although this serious engagement is often expressed comically in the form of satire. For example, What a Carve Up! reworks the plot of an old 1960s spoof horror film of the same name, in the light of the 'carve up' of the UK's resources which some felt was carried out by Margaret Thatcher's right wing Conservative governments of the 1980s. Coe studied at King Edward's School, Birmingham and Trinity College, Cambridge, before teaching at the University of Warwick where he completed a PhD in English Literature. In July 2006 he was given an honorary degree by The University of Birmingham.
British author Jonathan Coe's new novel reveals a whole new side to this sad and ironic eccentric. A heartfelt poetic and straightforward declaration of love is about the last thing one would expect from the author, over the years, from the early Home of Dreams to the relatively recent Middle of England, deftly balancing somewhere at the intersection of lyricism, grotesque and political satire. And yet to characterize Mr. Wilder and I in any other way is to err on the side of caution: his book is a veritable hymn of love for American filmmaker Billy Wilder and, more broadly, for all cinema at a time when filmmakers saw no shame in comforting, entertaining and supporting their audiences, rather than shaming, frightening or traumatizing them.
In the book's foreword, Jonathan Coe writes that he was fascinated by Billy Wilder in the late 1970s after watching his film The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. Even before the era of VCRs, Coe recorded Wilder's films (Russian audiences know him best from the legendary comedy Only Girls in Jazz) on audiocassettes and listened to dialogues from them at night - they, more than anything else, influenced his formation as a writer. Coe initially considered a full-length biography of his idol, but opted for the novel form, allowing him to get up close and personal with the character and perhaps even say something more truthful about him in the end.
Coe decides to "get closer" through a character specially invented for this purpose, Calista, a young half-Greek, half-English woman who is brought together with the great filmmaker by chance. Traveling across America in 1977, Calista meets a girl whose father was friends with Billy Wilder during the war and with her gets to dinner with the director, his best friend, screenwriter Easy Diamond, and their wives. Unused to drinking too much wine, Calista is forced to spend the night on the couch in Wilder's living room and assumes that the great director will never want to hear from her after that. But a few months later, back home in Athens, she unexpectedly receives a letter from Wilder: he is going to shoot a movie in Greece and offers Calista the role of interpreter for the film crew.
The novel's narrative breaks down into two time strata: in one, the now-aged Calista, a composer whose heyday is in the past, longs for the childhood years of her grown-up daughters and composes a suite dedicated to the memory of Billy Wilder. In the other timeline, in the happy and dazzling 1977, young Calista lives the main summer of her life on the set of the movie Fedora, first in Corfu and then in Munich, Normandy and Paris.
Fedora, which tells the story of a faded movie star who retreats from the world to a picturesque Greek island, was Diamond and Wilder's penultimate collaboration. The most serious, according to the director, the picture in their career (in the novel Diamond comedian constantly worries that he was not allowed to insert a single joke into the script) in England was received with moderation, but in America with a bang failed. Even during the shooting, almost all the characters (including naive Calista) realize that something is wrong with the film, that Billy has fallen in love with the story of an actress who survived her fame as a story of his own life and, shooting it, in fact, he thinks not about the audience, but about himself, about his aging and the change of time, which is impossible to ignore.
It's the seventies, the French New Wave is already sweeping the world, the energetic "bearded youths" (a collective definition Wilder applies to Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese) are all over Old School Hollywood, and Calista is privileged to witness the grand end of this great project.
Jonathan Coe's novel is enthusiastically cinephile in about the same sense as Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. They have a lot in common, too: both Coe and Tarantino are equally fascinated by the Golden Age of cinema, both are rather skeptical about what came to replace it, and both are in vain about names, facts, references and picture titles (Coe is probably a little more humane to the reader in this sense, but I still want to thank the translator and publisher for the extensive page comments).
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