Jonathan COE : Billy Wilder & me

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 realisation 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 ?

 

To be honest, when I started reading this book, I expected more : because Jonathan Coe is my favourite contemporary British author, because I love Billy Wilder's films, but the beginning didn't really engage me.
Yet I kept reading and as the story progressed, I enjoyed it more : because I watched practically every Billy Wilder film when I was younger, because I love Ernst Lubitsch too, because of Sherlock Holmes and his private life, because of the friendship between Diamond and Wilder.
And also because Jonathan Coe is obviously fond of his subject and that there is a parallel between how awful life has been for some and how they react to it, what kind of attitude they adopt, how cinema has evolved over the decades, how time flies. There was a lot of nostalgy for me in here and how can you resist Billy Wilder's humour ?
It ended a lot better than it began for me, yet I think this novel will touch those of my generation (or older !) more because we know the names of everyone involved - my daughters would be lost !