Customer Reviews

The Waitress Was New (Archipelago Books)

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Pierre is a bartender, a sweet man who has almost reached the age at which he could retire. He loves what he does, it is what he lives for and how he breathes. This book humble, yet so triumphant and full of life at the same time! It is very real, no huge ups and downs, no drum rolls, no brass bands. It is just what the author Dominique Fabre has intended: plain, simple, beautiful. He aims to share the life of a person on the margins, or someone that would not usually be interesting enough to write about, someone who you may not even notice. For some reason it feels like he could have chosen me or you in choosing Pierre, it is a person that is not worthy, and yet he never says that he is. It's pureness is very attractive.

The Waitress Was New drives the reader a desire to know this raw individual, Pierre. To learn more about him and his situation, and what will become of him in the end. The novel is human, and real and is not full of dramatic effect moments or overly sentimental junk. It is a story of a regular bartender, in a regular place, doing regular things. It is the way that Fabre conveys it all that is interesting...you dive down deep and come up with your fists full, and at the end of this novel he leaves you wishing for more, but knowing at the same time that it was the way it should be.

For the full 117 pages I was engulfed in reading this book it is so full of heart and personality. I am always more interested in the books that are about people that seem real to me and this is definitely one of those. It is about people-watching, living, loving, dying, old age, changes and sticking through it. I loved it. Here are some quotes for you that I thought were really great:

"I'm a fixture around here, people realize that. I served a few beers, brought the school kids their coffee, two coffees plus three glasses of water, and the girl greeted me with a peck on the cheek" (p. 16).

"I don't look outside too much because everything that matters to me in life always ends up sitting down at my bar, but just then I had a feeling, and I looked out toward the street. Yes, it was going to rain" (p. 22).

" I get off at seven but I'm never a stickler about leaving on time, what have I got to do at home? I'm just a barman, and the longer I stay on the more life goes by in the best possible way. So there we are" (p. 38).

"They come and go, for the most part. Let the world turn around us, beyond our spotless bars, in the end every day will be carefully wiped away to make room for the next. That's why I make myself watch the late-night news on Channel 3, you can't just forget everything, after all" (p. 98).

Losing one's livelihood is never easy. "The Waitress Was New" follows Pierre as the cafe that employed him as a bartender for most of his life suddenly closes. Over the next three days he much acclimate himself to the shock and figure out what to do. A deft examination of the human psyche, excellently translated from the original French by Jordan Stump, "The Waitress Was New" is a great pick for any seeking foreign fiction.

I love the title of this book, but it's not about the waitress. The narrator is Pierre, a fifty-six-year-old barman at Le Cercle, a busy café in the suburbs of Paris.

Pierre is a fixture at Le Cercle, where's he's worked steadily for the last eight years. But there are no fixtures in life. One day the boss disappears, and his wife after him. What now?

The translator of this book must be good. You can almost hear the sad lilt of French in the English prose. That's important, because style is the real substance of this little novel. Pierre has had his troubles in life - love and loss, sickness and drunkenness - but he's on the other side of "all that love business" when we meet him, alone and "seeing nothing more to come."

In his own words, Fabre celebrates "places or people who have somehow been overlooked." His subject is the everyday. Don't look for excitement here, just a certain poignant sense of life slipping by. In a larger sense, of course, Pierre's situation represents the human condition.

I'd like to try another novel by Fabre, but this seems to be the only one in English so far.

Since I'm frivolous enough to care about how a book feels in the hand, I'll just mention that this book is elegantly designed and nicely produced, as refined as the writing within.

"I'm only a barman, and when I forget that, the world around me seems like a bunch of different movies running at the same time. There are romance movies and sad movies, and if you pay attention most of their stories start to get all mixed together, till there's no way you can go on telling them to yourself. It's like they're all chasing after each other..."

This excerpt shows the complications inherent in the life of the "simple" bartender. Rather than being the nameless face behind the bar, important only in his quick delivery of a cocktail or beer, this novella by Dominique Fabre goes much deeper into the life of a very complex man. The story takes place over only a few days, yet we see, in detail, the conflicts within him and within his profession in the upscale cafe Le Cercle, where he's worked some eight years.

There's an abundance of unique characters, from the black-dressed young man who covers his poetry books with paper to hide the contents, to the articulate, kindly man who argues with the Moon and on to the beautiful but betrayed owner's wife. One of the underlying themes appears to be the pathological desire for order that Pierre, our fifty-six year old barman seeks. From his keeping the restaurant functioning to the way he does his laundry, Pierre is the picture of routine efficiency mixed with constant self-analysis. Yet his memories, that flood him often, reveal a past far from the orderly and efficient one he is living now.

"I started back toward Saint-Lazaire to catch the last train home. But the closer I got the less I liked the idea. In the end, I decided to walk back to Les Grésillons. All my papers were piled on my table, and in my head all the trimesters to come, waiting for me, and all my past. I took a nice shower, not too hot. It was way too late for the Channel 3 news. I wasn't really up to reading on a night like tonight. Then I couldn't think of anything else to do, so I went to bed." - The last lines of THE WAITRESS WAS NEW

THE WAITRESS WAS NEW is a diminutive novel; it can be read in an hour or two. Written by Dominique Fabre fifty years ago, it's the first-person narrative of Pierre, an aging bartender employed at Le Cercle, a café-restaurant in the Parisian suburb of Asnières. It spans about ten days, on the first of which a new waitress, Madeleine, appears at the café to temporarily replace a sick employee, and the boss departs quietly out the back door and doesn't return that day or the next, or the next. Pierre is left to run the popular eatery with Madeleine, the Senegalese cook Amédée, and the boss's wife.

THE WAITRESS WAS NEW is low-key almost to an extreme. It's as if you yourself recorded your stream of thoughts and impressions as you went about your daily occupation. But you probably wouldn't succeed with Pierre's simple charm as he interacts with those around him and leads his own very ordinary existence.

So, what's the book's appeal? Perhaps, to those of us at least Pierre's age - fifty-six - or older, it's the recognition of a kindred soul coming to an acceptance of advancing age and a diminished capacity to cope with what life may throw at us. Pierre himself is anxious over the prospect of losing his job. Could he get another gig tending bar? It's the only thing he knows how to do, and other applicants will be so much younger. Moreover, upon checking with the Social Security office, he disconcertingly learns that he has additional trimesters to work before becoming eligible for government retirement checks. Yet, he continues to inhabit his days with equanimity and grace born of wisdom and experience.

THE WAITRESS WAS NEW is perhaps not for everyone. Younger readers won't get it. And it's not a mystery, action thriller, or romance. It's just about everyday responsibilities and problems, simple joys, the leavening effect of memories past, and the continued drawing of breaths, one by one.

A veteran bartender of Le Cercle, Pierre, lives a simple life. He is the unassuming listener of customer stories and covers up for the boss of the cafe when he disappears for a day or two with his latest fling, and helps out at the cafe until he returns.

On the day a new waitress is hired at the cafe, the boss disappears in the afternoon without word to his wife or Pierre. Bu this time he doesn't come back the day after, or in a week. In the meantime, Pierre has to suddenly not only manage the cafe, the new waitress and the cook, but he is also put in the position of suddenly being the boss's wife's confidant and having to comfort her.

Oh and he's worried enough to try looking for his boss as well. Before long, his life is thrown into upheaval at an unexpected announcement and he takes stock of his life on a day he had not seen coming.

This poignant study of Pierre and his solitude highlights a person who is overlooked, but who is also at times taken advantage of.

Reminiscent of Remains of the Day, The Waitress Was New takes us into the mind of an aging waiter in his last few good years as a working man. He has many years of experience with the world and he has become a philosopher, a psychologist of the best sort, almost a seer, able to predict with surprising accuracy the moves of the weak and the strong.

Funny. Thoughtful.

The Book Report: Over the course of three days, fifty-six-year-old barman Pierre's life at Le Cercle cafe goes from six-year-long trudge towards retirement to unemployment as his creep of a midlife-crisis-ridden boss apparently abandons wife and business for the arms of a younger woman. Said wife even sends Pierre looking for her husband in all the usual suspects' haunts. Pierre, faithful to his own code of honor, does his best to make the situation work by hunting boss-man down, but comes up empty and reports failure; this is followed by the boss-lady's decision to close the cafe. Temporarily, she says, while she finds her husband and sorts things out.

Pierre, lacking other commitments and entanglements in his life, watches over the bar, lets the food and liquor delivery people in, wipes his spotless bar down, and watches his regulars drink and eat at La Rotonde, the competing bar across the square. At the end of a week of this useless work, plus the more useful work of getting his pension paperwork in order (four and a half years to go until the full ride is achieved), Pierre gets the call: The boss and wife are in Saint-Malo, starting afresh, and they've agreed to sell Le Cercle to someone else. The staff will be paid to the end of the month, and goodbye.

So what does Pierre do? He opens up. He serves the regulars, the staff, all comers, on the house. Why not? He's been screwed out of a safe and secure position, one he does well, and so why not do it one last time? Then he goes home. And because he can't think of anything else to do, he goes to bed. Fin.

My Review: How wonderful to read a book like this, short and to the point, one that allows me the reader to discover what kind of person the narrator/PoV character is without being spoon-fed opinions by a mistrustful author.

How interesting to be a fly on the wall behind the bar looking on as a business, a thriving one, loses its anchor and spins out of control. How pleasurable to see that not all the occupants of this anchorless business flee like rats from a sinking ship; the staunchness of the narrator is made up from equal parts honor and lack of imagination, which he sort of vaguely realizes.

And how very ordinary a man he is: Old enough to have weathered midlife, too young to view retirement with equanimity, still alive enough to notice the lack of a love in his life, and yet not vital enough to break the deadhanded grip of his difficult past (adopted at ten by the woman he still thinks of as his mother, dead these 12 years) and participate fully in the emotional life of the world. In short, there are millions of him walking around, a part of one small segment of the world yet apart from all the main channels of life.

The new waitress of the title replaced the waitress that the boss was having an affair with for two and more years. She started on Monday, and by Wednesday the cafe had closed. She lived in the farthest reaches of Paris, traveled over an hour to get to the job, and she was already tired of the job. Pierre reports these facts, he comments on them only in the briefest passages, but the reader feels, thanks to deft authorial choices made by the translator, the whole history of Pierre's life in the short transit of the new girl: He's always in transit, is Pierre, always looking at the ground he's standing on, waiting for it to root him, when he can't imagine how he should send down his own roots.

What a joy it was to read this book. Please, do the same for yourself, and revel in the short moment of being treated to a close look at someone more like you than is probably comfortable to view, and at the same time as the adult you certainly are at this point in your reading life.

Translated from the French by Jordan Stump, THE WAITRESS WAS NEW is a novella set on the outskirts of modern-day Paris in a small cafe owned by a husband and wife. When the husband disappears, the wife and tiny staff try to forge on: Amedee the Senegalese cook, Madeleine the new waitress, and the reflective narrator Pierre, a bartender who's nearing retirement after a complicated life.

I love work-based stories and this one is melancholy and full, very much like Stewart O'Nan's Last Night at the Lobster. The little book itself is also physically lovely -- it's one of a few I've borrowed from the library and then purchased a copy to keep. And it's Fabre's only story available in English; I hope more will be translated.

Pierre is a bartender in a busy neighborhood café just outside of Paris, who lives a mundane but peaceful life as he nears the end of his work career. He has experienced the ups and downs of life, but has no regrets about what has happened to him. He has only a few more trimesters of work before he can draw a full pension, and plans to work at the café until that time, as he has established a comfortable relationship with the owner and his wife. He lives alone, having no relationship with his ex-wife or past lovers, and his days are largely taken up with work.

Sabrina, the regular waitress, calls in sick, and a new waitress takes her place, without disrupting the tenor of the café. A few days later, the owner calls Pierre to inform him that he will not be working at the café that day; however, the owner's wife has no idea where he is, but suspects that he is having an affair with Sabrina. As the days progress, the owner continues to remain missing, and the operation of the café begins to slowly unravel.

This is a simple, quiet, and beautiful story of an ordinary man, which is infused with emotional depth and wisdom