Sulzer, Alain Claude. A Perfect Waiter.
Trans. John Brownjohn. New York: Bloomsbury, 2008. 211 p. ISBN: 978-1596914117. Hardcover. $19.95.

In 1966, Erneste, a waiter in his early fifties in Switzerland, receives a letter from New York. The letter is from Jakob, whom he has not seen or heard from for thirty years, and includes an unexpected request. Erneste is forced to relive the brief time he knew Jakob and to regret that there was one question that he did not ever ask him.

Erneste was working as a waiter at the Grand Hotel in Giessbach in 1935 when nineteen-year-old Jakob Meier came from Cologne to work at the hotel to avoid draft into the Wehrmacht. When Jakob first shakes Erneste’s hand, Erneste’s placid existence collapses. In a wittily erotic scene, Jakob is measured for his shirts, vests, jackets, and pants under the yearning eyes of Erneste. Handsome and self-assured, Jakob quickly becomes a perfect waiter. He also becomes Erneste’s perfect lover.

Sulzer gives a fascinating picture of life in a luxurious Swiss hotel during the mid-1930s, where well-off visitors, or refugees, from Germany were catered to by young men like Erneste and Jakob. The hotel is put into a stir when Julius Klinger, a famous writer, (modeled on Thomas Mann?) turns up with his wife and children. Soon after Klinger’s arrival, Erneste finds a 5-franc piece under Jacob’s pillow. Then he makes an appalling discovery.

A Perfect Waiter with its themes of time, “unfair, implacable, and incorruptible,” and the past, “like something inside a dark closet,” has been meticulously translated from the German. The story moves back and forth in time, gradually revealing its secrets, one by one. Highly recommended for large public and academic libraries that collect European literature or gay fiction with literary quality.

Reviewed by W. Stephen Breedlove
Reference Librarian/Interlibrary Loan Coordinator
La Salle University Library