Perfect Waiter

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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, ...

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A Perfect Waiter: A Novel

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Overview

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.

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Editorial Reviews

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.)

Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information
School Library Journal

What would you do if the lover you spurned 30 years ago and hadn't heard from since suddenly sent a letter demanding your help, even insisting that you plead his case before the very man who stole him from you? This is the dilemma facing Erneste, who has spent those intervening decades holed up in the remote Swiss resort town in which he lost his love, consoling (or punishing) himself by becoming the kind of waiter so perfect you barely notice he's there. In his first novel to be published in English, Sulzer creates a refined, operatic atmosphere in which Erneste's past and present mingle like air and fog. At times, the prose reads like low-watt Ann Patchett, though some of its elements evoke Thomas Mann's Death in Venice(e.g., the hotel setting, the character modeled on Mann) and Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day(e.g., the repressed servant, the pre-World War II flashbacks). The pace is leisurely, the plotting unfolds predictably-with two major exceptions-and the story's eroticism is restrained and mainstream. Some readers will want to shake Erneste and tell him to get over it already, but more compassionate readers may be intrigued by his masochistic psychology. Recommended for larger collections.
—Stephen Sposato Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information

Kirkus Reviews
This short, evocative novel combines a romantic melodrama of homosexual love and betrayal with deeper meditations on the passage of time, the essence of truth, the deception of desire and the inevitability of death. Originally published in Germany in 2004, this is the first novel by the veteran Alsatian author to be translated into English. The "perfect waiter" of the title is Erneste, who has spent his life serving guests at a Swiss resort hotel after his sexuality estranged him from most of his family. With the approach of World War II, an irresistibly attractive young German named Jakob arrives to work at the hotel. Though Erneste has long kept the guests, his fellow employees, even life itself at what he considers an appropriate distance, he can't keep his eyes off Jakob. And then his hands, though it isn't until the more impetuous Jakob makes a reckless advance that Erneste becomes his lover as well as his roommate and mentor. The ambitious Jakob quickly joins Erneste in the dining room, where they are careful to keep their relationship secret. The narrative alternates between the mid-1930s, when the two began their seemingly insatiable relationship, and the mid-1960s, when Erneste hears for the first time in 30 years from Jakob, who had abandoned him almost as abruptly as he seduced him. The opportunistic Jakob had attracted a hotel guest, prosperous German novelist Julius Klinger. Two desperate letters from Jakob (now "Jack," apparently on his own in New York) bring Erneste and Julius together. The extent of Jakob's duplicity comes as a shock to the impeccably mannered, brokenhearted waiter. Had Jakob ever loved either man? Was sex simply bait or a bargaining chip for him? Dideither of the men he seduced for his own advancement know Jakob at all, or had desire blinded them both?For all the sexual intrigue, Erneste seems a bit like a Camus character in a Thomas Mann setting.
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Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9781596914117
  • Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
  • Publication date: 4/1/2008
  • Pages: 224
  • Product dimensions: 5.68 (w) x 7.65 (h) x 0.94 (d)

Meet the Author

Alain Claude Sulzer was born in Basel in 1953. His first novel was published in 1983 and he has since written four further novels, including Annas Maske (2001), and numerous short stories. A Perfect Waiter is his first novel to be published in English. He lives in Alsace. John Brownjohn is one of Britain’s leading translators from the German and has won critical acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic including for My Wounded Heart: The Life of LIlli Jahn 1900–44 by Martin Doerry (Bloomsbury, 2004). Among his most recent awards are the Schlegel-Tieck Prize for Thomas Brussig’s Heroes Like Us and the Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize for Marcel Beyer’s The Karnau Tapes.

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