A Perfect Waiter: A Novel [Hardcover]

Alain Claude Sulzer (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1, 2008

A sweeping, powerful novel about a man forced to come to terms with the memory of his lost love.

Erneste is the perfect waiter—and his private life seems to embody the qualities he brings to his profession. But inwardly this polite and dignified man is in the grip of a violent passion, aroused thirty years before, when he fell in love with a young waiter-in-training named Jakob. Jakob broke his heart when he fled Nazidominated Europe for a new life in America with his lover, Julius Klinger, a celebrated German intellectual. Nursing his wounds, Erneste slinks even deeper into his well-ordered world, hardening into what had only previously been a role. And then, after decades of silence, he receives a letter from a distraught and penniless Jakob asking for help. And Ernest must decide if he will finally take action. Set against the backdrop of a genteel Swiss hotel, and moving skillfully between two time periods, this exquisitely written story of a lifelong passion is rich in tension and emotion, exploring the nature of love and betrayal, memory, and regret.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In Alsace-based Sulzer's first translated novel, set in 1966 Switzerland, self-possessed, middle-aged Erneste is the rock of the Restaurant am Berg, working the lavish Blue Room without missing a shift in 16 years. A letter posted from New York threatens to shatter the orderly cocoon he's built around himself. Claiming to be in a bad way from every angle, Jakob Meier, Erneste's one great love of 30 years ago, pleads with Erneste to track down Julius Klinger, the intellectual whom Jakob followed to America in 1936. Klinger, Jakob tells Erneste, has returned to Europe, been nominated for a Nobel prize and lives near Erneste; Jakob wants Erneste to ask Klinger for money, and to send it. Erneste is immediately torn between his tidy independence and intense longing. Sulzer sure-handedly layers the past on the present, gradually opening windows on both. The pieces fall together like bits of a puzzle, with a full portrait of Erneste and the truth about his relationship with Jakob coming together only at the end, powerfully. (Apr.)
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From Booklist

This odd little novel—odd meaning unique—is the first by this Swiss novelist to be translated into English. Sulzer has achieved an intense character study in creating the perfect waiter, Erneste. The novel is set in 1966, and middle-aged Erneste is demonstrating his professional skills at a high-end Swiss resort hotel. But he has no life to speak of other than his work. Erneste leads an insulated existence, removed from the activities and cares that absorb most people’s lives. But in a series of flashbacks to a sequence of events that took place 30 years prior, the much-younger Erneste came out of the shell in which he’d already encased himself to train another young man to be a perfect waiter and even entered into an affair with him while they were employed at the same establishment. Then one day, the reappearance—by letter—of that young man, who ultimately broke Erneste’s heart, once again compels him to step out of his set routines. A spare, elegant, controlled, and poignant psychological study. --Brad Hooper

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA; First Edition edition (April 1, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1596914114
• ISBN-13: 978-1596914117
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,280,284 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Practically Perfect Novel About A Man of No Importance?, April 12, 2008

By 

H. F. Corbin "Foster Corbin" (ATLANTA, GA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: A Perfect Waiter: A Novel (Hardcover)

In Alain Claude Sulzer's short novel Erneste is described by many as a perfect waiter. For sixteen years he has waited tables in the Blue Room of the Restaurant am Berg in a Swiss hotel. When the novel opens on September 15, 1966, Erneste is fifty, has no friends, does not own a television; he is alone, but not lonely, "or only sometimes." His life outside the hotel, where he is a model employee, never missing work, is simple and uncomplicated. On Sundays, his only day off, he sleeps in and may listen to operatic arias on the radio although he has never been to an opera. He is content with being a waiter-- until this fateful September day when he receives a letter from New York from a long lost lover of thirty years ago, Jakob Meier, someone he has thought about every day of his life since then.

The writer has crafted a nearly perfect novel of longing and memory that is reminiscent of James Joyce's brilliant short story "The Dead", Thomas Mann's "Death in Venice" and is as evocative as the wondrous poetry of Constantine Cavafy. The character Julius Klinger could have been modeled in part on Thomas Mann since Klinger, like Mann, in this novel wins the Nobel Prize, moves to America and, though married with children, is attracted to younger men.

Sulzer recreates a time and place in world history that continues to fascinate readers-- Europe just before the beginning and during World War II-- and does it with style and grace. His account of Erneste and Jakob's passionate affair is as erotic as anything you are likey to read. Both Klinger and Erneste are "besotted"-- in the words of the translator John Brownjohn-- with Jakob. But we don't have here another D. H. Lawrence as less is more. There is, for example, an achingly erotic scene when Erneste takes Jakob to the tailor Frau Adamowicz and her female assistants to get him measured and fitted for a waiter's outfit. While the women demurely look away, Jakob strips down to his underwear and Erneste helps him dress in his new uniform: "Jakob unbuttoned his shirt, took it off. . . pulled his trousers down over his buttocks and thighs with both hands. . . It was the most natural series of movements in the world, but to Erneste it was something special." As it certainly is to the reader.

These characters--if they are to be believable-- and the events in their lives are restrained by the time and place. Klinger says as much when he tells Erneste of an unsuccessful novella he wrote after the end of "the war" about a failed love affair between an older man and a younger woman that in truth was about two men. "That's the story I should have written, but I couldn't--I never even tried because the time isn't ripe for such stories. Mark my words, though, in twenty or thirty years' time it may be possible to write a story like that." We remember that E. M. Forster's beautiful novel MAURICE, though written in 1913 and 1914, at the author's direction, was not published until 1971, a year after his death.

The character Erneste raises questions we may not want to ask. To the casual observer, certainly the clientele he serves, he would appear to be a man of no consequence, a mere waiter, someone they wouldn't recognize if they saw him away from the restaurant. Yet for a brief period when he was twenty, he came alive with passion and love, if only for a season. He loved madly if not wisely. Could he have done things differently or steered his life in another direction? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Certainly Tennyson would say that it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.

A PERFECT WAITER, originally written in German, is Sulzer's first work published in English. Let us hope it is not his last.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Very Lyrical and Rewarding Novel, March 27, 2009

By 

Zinc (Midwest USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Perfect Waiter (Paperback)

"A Perfect Waiter" easily deserves the four and five star ratings that other reviewers have given to it, and I agree with the views expressed about this book by those folks who are more learned about these things than I. This story is a romantic tragedy, not as vindictive as Othello, but nonetheless tragic. Jakob Meier is, in my opinion, the chief villain here. He is a subtle and effective manipulator who, after more than three decades of silent absence, is capable of reaching across thousands of miles and coercing Erneste to do his bidding. Erneste has established a comfortable, insulated life for himself. I thought the internal struggle Erneste experienced before acquiescing to Jakob's request was beautifully and heart-breakingly rendered. "A Perfect Waiter" is a brilliantly quiet masterpiece.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Understated and elegant storytelling, September 8, 2008

By 

Jose Sotolongo (Kingston, NY United States) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: A Perfect Waiter: A Novel (Hardcover)

This quiet, carefully written book develops the story of Erneste, the perfect waiter of the title, and the co-worker he falls in love with, Jakob. As the story unfolds and we see the ultimate breakdown in the relationship, we glimpse details of daily life in a German resort: the social conventions, the foods eaten, and the dressing habits of the characters. We also experience a rare thing in literature: a realistic account of a love affair where there is hurt and disappointment, but where there are no villains or virtuous heroes, just people with different needs and priorities.

This is not an exciting, lust-filled book. This is a carefully narrated account of a brief relationship and the ensuing decades of estrangement, anger, and, finally, understanding and forgiveness. It is a mature and moving novel, a must for anyone the least bit interested in contemporary European literature of the highest quality. If I don't give it the fifth star, it's because of a slightly rambling narrative line, but this merely a flaw in an otherwise beautiful tapestry.