Synopses & Reviews
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.
Review
Praise for A Perfect Waiter: "Like a character out of Camus or Kafka, Erneste does not appeal to us by his warmth or humanity; he resists our pity. It's the sheer simplicity of his one love -- and the steely purity of his life -- that fascinates: more metal than flesh, incorporeal, perfect."
—Los Angeles Times"What an ideal title for a novel. And what, in Alain Sulzer's hands, an admirable novel to go with this masterful billing. By the novella's end, we are smitten with Sulzer's writing and conceptualization, and won over by the clarity and simplicity of his ideas. Sometimes, less is more. This brief tale—haunting as a mother's lullaby—proves that true."—Buffalo News
"[A] sleek, understated novel…a highly choreographed waltz of emotional blackmail. It skirts melodrama, but Sulzers restraint in depicting each subsequent betrayal keeps the raw emotions in check. Sulzer addresses homosexual desire directly, exposing the damage severe repression brings. Sulzer has written an absorbing miniature. He so thoroughly inhabits Erneste that the waiters muted inner life proves more gripping than the overtly dramatic scenes of betrayal and attempted extortion. It is the whisper, not the shout, that grabs the attention."—Bookforum
"In his first novel to be published in English, Sulzer creates a refined, operatic atmosphere. The prose reads like Ann Patchett, though some of its elements evoke Thomas Mann's Death in Venice and Kazu Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day." —Library Journal "Suzler sure-handedly layers the past on the present, gradually opening windows on both. The pieces fall together like bits of a puzzle...coming together only at the end, powerfully.”—Publishers Weekly
"A spare, elegant, controlled, and poignant psychological study."—Booklist
"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."—Kirkus“Alain Claude Sulzer writes with utterly classical, old-fashioned aplomb.”—Die Zeit
“Fascinating. Its as if an opulent Magic Mountain, a memory in fading colors of a mundane love story, has been photographed anew.”—Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
“Sulzers novel, or rather novella, has great stylistic elegance, and offers many enjoyments and pleasures beyond its subtle abundance of literary allusion. His skill lies more in small observations than dramatic sweep.”—Süddeutsche Zeitung
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 Britains 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 Brussigs
Heroes Like Us and the Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize for Marcel Beyers
The Karnau Tapes.