A Perfect Waiter

"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.

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.

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.

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 cha