A Perfect Waiter

January 7, 2008
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.

March 1, 2008
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 preWorld War II flashbacks). The pace is leisurely, the plotting unfolds predictablywith two major exceptionsand 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, Chicago P.L.

Copyright 2008 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 1, 2008
This odd little novelodd meaning uniqueis the first by this Swiss novelist to be translated into English.Sulzer has achieved an intense character study in creating the perfectwaiter, Erneste. The novel is set in1966, and middle-aged Erneste is demonstrating his professional skillsat a high-end Swiss resort hotel. But he has no life to speak of other than his work. Erneste leads an insulatedexistence, removed from the activities and cares that absorb most peoples lives. But in a series of flashbacks to a sequence of events that took place 30 years prior, the much-younger Erneste came out ofthe shell in which hed already encased himself to train another young man to be a perfect waiter and even entered into an affairwith himwhile theywere employed at the same establishment. Then one day, the reappearancebyletterof that youngman, who ultimately broke Ernestes heart, once again compels him to step out of his set routines. A spare, elegant, controlled, and poignant psychological study.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2008, American Library Association.)