Mr Wilder & Me

It was the name of Billy Wilder rather books by Jonathan Coe that made me pick this off the shelf. After reading it, I’m now a big fan of Jonathan Coe.

That said, I couldn’t work out where it was going at first. It starts with the narrator dealing with domestic problems before slipping into a teenage memory of meeting Billy Wilder at a Beverly Hills restaurant, and then into an account of being hired to work for him as a translator on the set of his film Fedora. Then it shifts again, as the film crew move to studios in Germany and we’re presented with a lengthy passage – written as a film script – in which Wilder, an Austrian Jew, describes his experiences in World War II.

So what is this? A fictional memoir, a la William Boyd? A meditation on age and a film-maker losing touch with the times? Perhaps one man’s final reckoning with his own personal connection to the Holocaust? It’s all of these, and yet it isn’t. I think the key to the book is in the final chapters, and the return to the domestic upheavals it began with. Then all the strings of all the plots are pulled together, into a very touching affirmation of... life. Just life itself.

One of my favourite books of the year.