Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
English author Coe (Middle England) offers a witty elegy for the last gasp of old Hollywood. While backpacking across America in 1976, 21-year-old Greek musician Calista Frangopoulou has a chance encounter with real-life 70-year-old film director Billy Wilder at a Beverly Hills restaurant. So charmed is Wilder with Calista that he invites her to work as his interpreter on the production of his next movie, Fedora, on Corfu. After proving herself invaluable to the director, Calista travels with Wilder to Munich for further filming. There, Wilder, a Viennese Jew who fled Germany before WWII, is forced once again to confront his country's Nazi past. Meanwhile, Calista stumbles into a romance with a young English film student. A lengthy flashback to Wilder's life as a German émigré is affectingly rendered in screenplay format. Coe's fictionalized account of the real-life filming of Fedora--which Wilder's inability to finance in Hollywood his writing partner incisively attributes to the business's youth-obsessed preference for "kids with beards," such as Spielberg and Scorsese--is filled with hilarious anecdotes and some hard-won wisdom. As Wilder embarks on what will turn out to be his penultimate picture, Coe brings great sympathy to his touching depiction of an older artist fighting to remain relevant. Coe's fans will fall for this one. (Sept.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
Coe (Middle England) reveals the mind of a legendary director at the sunset of his career, witnessed by his fictional narrator at the dawn of hers. Calista "Cal" Frangopoulou hasn't written a film score in over a decade, and as her own life transitions from active motherhood to empty nest, she remembers her part in bringing Billy Wilder's 1978 film Fedora to the screen. Though the real-life Cal never existed, Wilder and cowriter I.A.L. Diamond did shoot that film on location in Greece. Inserting naive Cal as their interpreter creates a credible, frequently funny perspective on the collaborators' relationship and penultimate project. Narrator Kristen Atherton inhabits Cal's character as both 50- and 20-something, rallying in middle age against personal stagnation and feeling her way through youthful meetings and partings, always inspired by "Mr. Wilder's" genius. Atherton uses accent and affect to distinguish the Austrian American director and his international circle of friends, cast, and crew across multiple time periods for an overall easy-to-follow, immersive performance that leaves listeners ready for a watch (or rewatch) of Some Like It Hot, Double Indemnity, or any of Wilder's masterpieces. VERDICT Coe's fans will be delighted; a perfect choice for all cinephiles.--Lauren Kage
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
