Product Description

Erneste works in a grand hotel in Switzerland. He is the 'perfect waiter', a model of order in every way. But inwardly this polite, withdrawn man has been caught in the grip of an overwhelming passion that began in the summer of 1935 with Jakob, a fellow waiter. For Jakob the affair is just a fling, but for Erneste it is true love. When the great German writer Julius Klinger arrives at the hotel, seeking sanctuary from Hitler's Germany, his gaze, too, lights on Jakob. One morning, three decades later, Erneste receives a letter with a US postmark from Jakob asking for help. It is a call that forces Erneste to engage with the world again and risk discovering the truth behind his memories of the great love of his youth. Shifting skilfully between two eras, Sulzer's tense, moving and elegantly written novel is a small masterpiece about the joy and pain of love.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #79752 in Books
• Published on: 2009-01-19
• Original language: German
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

Review
'A beautifully written and quietly devastating novel' Attitude 'The real perfect waiter of the title is, I suspect, the author himself. Like his hero, he is unobtrusive and alarming in equal measure ... he does his job not just with great polish, but with real heart' Guardian 'Sulzer carefully walks a tightrope between the tender and the erotic ... A melancholy, shocking tale' Irish Times 'It tells a compelling love story between two men both working in a grand hotel in the 1930s ... This is elegant writing, perfectly pitched to reflect the sadness and regret attendant on such a liaison' Rodney Troubridge, Booksellers' Choice, Bookseller

About 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 German translators 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.

Customer Reviews

Not Quite The Perfect Waiter
I have to say until about three quarters of the way into this I wasn't sure how much I liked this novel. Now I do not mean I thought it was a bad novel. The writing is beautifully the setting is wonderful but I didn't like the characters of which for a lot of it there are only two. However with the arrival of the third character the plot suddenly speeded up and produced an ending that I hadn't expected at all. Isn't it funny how a character can make you feel about a book? In fact I think that could be a future blog... anyway the book.

The novel begins with Ernest who is work obsessive, he never really speaks to his family, bar his cousin Julia, and isn't particularly friendly with any of his co-workers he likes to keep his life a solitary one (the whole way through I wanted to know what had made him that way) out of the blue he receives a letter from an old friend Jakob. He hasn't seen Jakob for over thirty years since the mid 1930's when he came to work in the same hotel in the Swiss mountains.

What follows is quite a sad and desolate study of love. From when they meet Ernest is uncontrollably taken with Jakob to the point of nearing obsession and when they do become lovers he becomes like an addiction. However we know from the start that suddenly Jakob left what we don't know is why. You need to read the book to find out that part. I found the relationship between the men incredibly well written; I thought the insight as to what it was like to be gay in that era was quite insightful as well. I would have liked to have seen more reaction to it as the book focuses in a very insular way on just the two men at first.

Jakob I have to admit I didn't like to read, I don't know what it was but I couldn't take to him at all. He isn't a particularly nice character however sometimes we all love a good villain. I didn't understand why he was the way he was, in fact that could actually be applied to Ernest and his background too, I wanted to know a lot more about them than I was given. I loved the parts with Ernest's cousin Julia in, but they still didn't open up his past or nature of his character any further which was saddening for me. Three quarters of the way through the book another character is introduced a long with a quite sudden and shocking twist to the plot who is a character with real background and who I enjoyed reading more.

The final quarter of the book is what made me think that this was something special as I had been on the fence with this novel until then. The pace suddenly picks up, I don't know if it's the original or the translation but though the prose is stunning it's actually quite repetitive in parts. I would recommend people give this a go as its something different. I saw a review that this is a gay version of `Remains of the Day' I wouldn't say that by any means (because I haven't read it - shocking I know), I think from what I do know of them, they are quite different. What it is however is a look at how love can go wrong, become obsession and the consequences of that.

"His soul felt the touch of ice and he was touched by it, frozen and terrified."
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 obvious obstacles and the inevitable passage of time. Mike Leonard June 08.

The Perfect Waiter
It was a good read, slow at first but more and more becoming a bit more meaningful. As the book gets into a few chapters and slowly into the climax the twist is very good, the whole idea of what happens between man servant, master and son is extremely well presented. A good climax and all in all quite interesting.