Customer Reviews

A Perfect Waiter: A Novel

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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.

"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.

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.

Tired of waiting for the next great literary novel? Rejoice, the wait is over. "A Perfect Waiter" is a gorgeous prose piece, not unlike "The Remains of the Day" and "The English Patient," which tells a haunting story in flashback sequences and images both languid and indelible.

Set in Switzerland circa 1935 and 1966, the protagonist is Erneste, a consummate waiter at an elegant restaurant, who has surrendered himself to a solitary life of subservience and service; content now with only memories of an idyllic pre-war romance with a handsome youth named Jakob.

The reverie of the young lovers was shattered by the arrival of Julius Klinger, a world-famous writer (patterned after Thomas Mann) who became infatuated with the increasingly duplicitous Jakob, ultimately luring him away with promises of security and a new life in America.

In 1966 Erneste's perfectly ordered and appointed existence is disrupted when letters arrive from Jakob in America, beseeching him to see the now elderly Klinger and beg him for financial assistance. The events that follow are revelatory; filled with recriminations, secrets and the expression of frustrated emotions. However, it's the quiet momemnts which sing the loudest; the internalized melodies of passion and rapture and sorrow and bitter misunderstanding.

Sulzer creates a stunning tapestry of scenes. "A Perfect Waiter" is multilayered; erotic and suspenseful, violent and heartrending. A nearly perfect novel.

I found a lot of sadness in this novel but I'm so glad I read it. Perhaps a single year of absolute happiness DOES balance out thirty years of dull regret. Still, at the end of the book, it appears that the future holds little joy for either the Thomas Mann-like Klinger or for Erneste though I suspect the latter will continue to be "the perfect waiter."

This story would make a beautiful "Merchant Ivory-type" film.

Having read the original German edition, I was impressed by the excellent translation by John Brownjohn. Every nuance is retained, and this beautifully touching tale of love lost is now available for English speakers, losing nothing in the transition. Often this is not the case, as you cannot literally interpret German into English, as so many German words don't exist in the English language. Mr Brownjohn has eloquently overcome these difficulties, and the book is a joy to read in English.

Others have commented on the plot and the characters, so there is no need for me to elaborate, other than to say this is a little gem that might have only been savoured by German speakers, had not such an excellent translation been achieved.

An extremely touching and poignant book that deserves to be widely read, and then read again.

In a time that the internet prevails making the world seem smaller and smaller on a daily basis, comes the novel, A PERFECT WAITER, by Alain Claude Sulzer. Here is a love story that is so universal, it too makes the world seem smaller still. It's about first love that doesn't last long, but is so powerful that it stays with the main character, Erneste longer than thirty years. In the course of the story, he never finds or looks for a replacement for that first love, not because the love was merited by the lover, but because he can't or won't let it go.

The time frame of the story moves between two time periods, Mid-1930's Europe when Hitler is gaining power in Germany and war is imminent, and in 1966, when Erneste receives a long awaited letter from his lost love, Jakob, who is in America. This is the first time in the thirty years that there has been any communication between the two men of any kind and it awakens anew within Erneste the feelings that have only been lying dormant for all those years. It's been his job as a waiter that has enabled Ernest to function on a daily basis in the interim and what began as a job has now become a way of life. Now this letter threatens even that excuse for a life.

The thing that makes this novel so universal is because it is drawn from reality. Love more often than not is not reciprocated. And even when it is for a short period as in this case, forces come along that end that love. But, even so, a passionate love experienced wins over no love anytime and in the hands of this skillful author and the man who translated his words from the German, it makes for a very intriguing novel. I've read it twice so far.

With the events in this story-taking place in Switzerland, A Perfect Waiter is a lovely and rather sad study of love, the power of memory, and the potential for an overwhelming and all-consuming desire. The novel begins when the solitary and emotionally shut-down Erneste receives a letter from New York, from Jakob Meier, a man who was his best and dearest friend thirty years ago back in the summer of 1935.

There is no really explanation for why after all these years Jakob is reaching out to his former lover, simply that there are financial problems and he's begging for help and he seems to be unable to take care of himself. But the letter effectively jump-starts Erneste's yearnings, making him relive the weight of loss, and the cruel and hurtful way that the beautiful and seemingly untroubled Jakob had eventually abandoned him for America.

Erneste has spent the last sixteen years working as a waiter at the Restaurant am Berg, the most dependable member of an ever-changing staff, Erneste is almost like a blank slate, shadowlike when he has to be, but also an attentive observer, thoroughly alert and quick on the uptake. Indeed Erneste has never aspired to any other profession and has lived for years in a small apartment.

In that regard nothing had changed since his first job thirty-five years ago. He is free, with the past locked away in his abundant recollections, "like something inside a dark closet," and although the past is precious, the closet remains unopened. But now his thoughts are straying constantly revolving around Jakob's letter and a secret he is unable or unwilling to share with anyone else, "like a hand reaching for him" its pressure is neither heavy nor light."

Even the photos he kept of Jakob are out of reach, as remote as Jakob's breath, and even more remote than the memories of their time together at Giessbach, in 1935 when the young German trainee waiter came from Cologne for a spell of employment in Switzerland in order to being drafted into the Wehrmacht. With Erneste's emotions unequivocal and consequently threatening, he finds himself instantly attracted to Jakob's forthright and open gaze, passing so close to the boy that they almost touch when they first meet on the boat ramp at the foot of the hotel.

Buoyed along by his desires and his need to care for the boy, Erneste shows him everything a waiter needs to know even as he battles with the urge to slip inside him, his illicit desire driving Erneste to supervise him like a child. Jakob of course, proves himself to be alert, adaptable, and coolheaded and before long was past teaching anything anymore as he steadily masters all the tricks of the trade and quickly becoming the perfect waiter.

As this story gravitates between 1935 and 1966, Erneste must wrestle with his longings and desires for Jakob as they suddenly reappear, more steady and more profoundly real than ever. And he's constantly bounded at night by his memories of their clandestine lovemaking in his cramped attic room and their secretive couplings by the shores of the lake. It is these reminiscences that give this novel so much feeling - Erneste's yearnings for the night to come and his longing for ever more physical contact with Jakob.

But their instant attraction and easy intimacy is doomed to fade. Although Erneste is convinced they fit together so perfectly, he never anticipated such an unexpected end even as he harbors a strange presentiment, a vague sense of something incomprehensible, something that lurks behind his excitement, something foolish and distressing in the form of a threat that he wants no part of, a distressing threat that lay behind the happiness and joy that surges through him.

In a world where passion becomes a dangerous slaveholder, Erneste finds himself caught between an outward calm and an explosion that bursts inside of him, dislodging his long pent up feelings - the message these letters ultimately bring him is almost too much for him to contemplate. Inevitably asked to be a go-between, Erneste even flirts with blackmail, his actions an ultimate testament to the enduring power of his love for Jakob.

Alternating between his time periods, Sulzer perfectly encapsulates time and place, his novel a moody and fitting testament to an age where same-sex love was often shrouded in a type of grand and illusive secrecy. Although his themes of lost love and misunderstood desire may be bleak, the novel is also infused with a great beauty. For a short time at least, Erneste's life is filled with all of the possibilities that first love can offer. Certainly the passing years have not impaired the clarity of his memories and now they reappear as fresh and potent as ever, his love for his young friend enduring despite the obstacles and the inevitable passage of time. Mike Leonard June 08

The Gay and Lesbian Book Group discussed this novel at the LGBT Center in NYC in Sept 2010.

I think we had a large group for this discussion because so many people enjoyed the novel. While some were clearly much more entranced by it than others, even those who didn't love the novel found something about it that they liked. Everyone thought that Sulzer is a very good writer.

Those who loved it, thought that it grabbed the reader in the first sentence and found it full of sensuous writing and illuminating details. Many readers commented on the sequences when Erneste watches Jakob get fitted for his uniform and the first unexpected kiss.

Those who found the short novel just OK did not see the appeal of Jakob and found him ultimately too evil to be loved and for Erneste to carry a torch for him as long as he did. Some wanted to know more of Erneste's background and then Jakob's life in America (but I like the fact that the story remained in Switzerland). Some found the story - which moved in alternate chapters between 1966 and Germany in 1935 just before the war - to be too contrived, but I found it to be an amazing way to reveal information. One or two minor characters may be unnecessary but are required to fill out the story and keep it from becoming too claustrophobic.

We finally agreed that Klinger was the one undeniably evil character in the novel. (Without spilling the beans - Klinger is clearly modeled on Thomas Mann and his tragic gay son, Klaus.) Jakob may have been an opportunist who hurt several people, but without Klinger's bad decisions, none of the sad events of the novel would have happened.

Either recommended (for very critical readers) or highly recommended (for book clubs, and for romantics and lovers of heavily plotted and complex short novels).

I won't repeat what has already been so skillfully conveyed by others, but I enjoyed this melancholy portrait of an ordinary man whose greatest talent is to be discreet as he waits on others. Sadly, he is required to be just as discreet in his private life. As a young man, in 1930s Switzerland, he experiences the love of his life with a fellow waiter, though if the nature of their relationship were discovered, it would result in immediate dismissal. Even thirty years later, in 1966, when he seeks same sex intimacy at a public bathroom, he is beaten by a gang of assailants for his momentary lack of discretion. The story is a compelling portrait of how a broken heart combined with constraints of society help cause a gentle man, capable of great love and passion, to resign himself to a solitary and banal existence.