Mr. Wilder and I by Jonathan Coe

In search of a story that addresses that universe that unfolds in nascent human relationships, Jonathan Coe, for his part, deals with the exquisiteness of the most introspective details. Yes indeed, Coe He cannot abandon that detailed preciousness that he contextualizes with the most complete descriptions. From the room in which a conversation takes place with its ornaments and aromas to the world that passes beyond its windows. An inventory that this author presents to us as the repertoire of the narrator obsessed with making everything visible and tangible ...

At fifty-seven, Calista Frangopoulou's career as a composer of soundtracks, a Greek who has lived in London for decades, is not at its best. Neither does her family life: her daughter Ariane is going to study in Australia, apparently not saddening her in the same way that it saddens her mother, and her other teenage daughter, Fran, is waiting to terminate an unwanted pregnancy. While her profession corners her and her daughters, determined or hesitant, begin to make their way on their own, Callista remembers the moment when it all began for her; July 1976, when in Los Angeles, and ostensibly unprepared for the occasion, she appeared with her friend Gill at a dinner held by an old friend of her father: a seventies film director that neither of them knows anything about, and it turns out to be Billy Wilder; Wilder, who, with his elusive bonhomie, ends up hiring Callista as an interpreter to assist her in the filming of her new movie, Fedora, which will be shot in Greece the following year.

And so, on the island of Lefkada, in the summer of 1977, Calista Frangopoulou begins to make her way on her own as her daughters will later do: and discovers the world, and love, and, at the hand of one of her great geniuses , a particular way of understanding cinema that is beginning to disappear. That's what he takes now. You haven't made a serious movie unless viewers leave the theater feeling like they want to commit suicide. (…) You have to give them something else, something a little more elegant, a little more beautiful ", he says, first sardonic and then tender, a Billy Wilder excellently characterized in the pages of this book; and later he adds: «Lubitsch lived through the great war in Europe (I mean the first), and when you have already gone through something like that you have internalized it, do you understand what I mean? The tragedy becomes part of you. It's there, you don't have to shout it from the rooftops and splatter the screen with that horror all the time. "

Attentive to the teacher's teachings, Mr. Wilder and I he is committed to a kindness loaded with content, capable also of approaching the drama with the greatest sobriety: the uncertainties of youth, but also those of adulthood; the frailties of the family, its strengths; the private and collective trauma of the Holocaust… all appear in this nostalgic, sweet, timeless and charming novel, with which a Jonathan Coe returns full of sensitivity and profession.

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