It has been almost one and a half years since I read this tiny little book, but it has not managed to elude my regular thoughts, and for such a plain, seemingly unimposing novel without any impressive sequences of action, that should probably say more than enough.

"A Perfect Waiter" deals with a protagonist called Erneste who works as a waiter in a Swiss hotel and has obtained a reputation as being a man who quietly possesses all the qualities expected of a waiter - of a perfect waiter. He is polite and attentive, but remains withdrawn and never puts his personal affairs above his professional obligations. What seemingly nobody knows: Erneste engages himself in a love affair with another waiter, Jakob, but what feels like true, affectionate and tender love to Erneste, is nothing more than just another fling, just another love affair to Jakob.

The action lies in the protagonist's thoughts, in his recollections of the past and his observations of the present, in the quiet existence of his sorrow and solitude. In many ways, one might expect those feelings to amount to some kind of revelation, to an eruption which could mean escape from his predetermined, ordinary and repetitive everyday life. But this eruption never happens, and quietude is what the bars of his prison are made of.
The main story (told through flashbacks by Erneste) is set during the mid-1930s, a time when the revelation of Erneste's love affair would have meant his social demise, his ejectment from his work, from the people he knows, from society. He knows that well enough, and the simple knowledge of the fact that there never will be anybody he could possibly discuss the true nature of his emotional condition with causes him to feel like the loneliest person on the planet. He finds escape and distraction in his work, a profession he loves and doesn't want to lose.
And to all this, there is only one possibe solution: Erneste has no other choice but to become invisible. And as a waiter, he needs the ability to become invisible, to attend his guests' wishes without them noticing his presence. It's the perfect disguise for his fragile emotional state. After all, there is no reason to think that the wounds inflicted by love might not heal one day, or is there?

The story focuses on being a prisoner in one's profession, on being emotionally injured in an involvement of love. As a result, the two main themes of this novel are two of the things I personally fear the most, and maybe that's why this novel has touched me so profoundly. Erneste's life has been a source of inspiration, and even if this story may be fictional, there is no doubt that the emotional turmoil expressed by author Alain Claude Sulzer is one experienced by many people around the world.

This novel reveals that sometimes it's the quietness which expresses itself the loudest. I honestly have no idea of how you should define perfection in a book - but this tale about a perfect waiter is, to my perception, also a perfect novel. ( )

Ein perfekter Kellner - which rather oddly doesn't seem to have been made into a film yet - works a bit like a gay, Swiss Remains of the day. Erneste is a middle-aged man, apparently quite contented with his solitary life and his career as a waiter in the best restaurant of a Swiss lakeside town. But, one day in 1966, an unexpected letter forces him to deal with the memory of the great, unhappy love affair of his life, and to confront the ageing writer Julius Klinger (a rather thinly-disguised Thomas Mann lookalike) who, thirty years ago, had waltzed off to America with the beautiful Jakob, with whom Erneste had shared two delightfully hot and sweaty summers of passion in between shifts in the staff bedroom they shared in a mountain hotel where the exiled Klinger and his family were guests.

This could all be a bit predictable, but Sulzer for the most part manages to avoid labouring the obvious. In the thirties flashbacks he takes it for granted that we know who Hitler was and why some Germans chose to go into exile; in the sixties chapters he sketches in the Dürrenmattish Swiss-noir atmosphere with a fairly light touch, but perhaps tries a bit too hard to show us that it wasn't entirely straightforward to live as a gay man in sixties Switzerland. But his publisher would have sent the manuscript back if he'd missed out the obligatory gay-bashing scene, so that's probably forgivable. My only serious problem with the book is that it's a bit too easy to see where the story is likely to go if you know something about the real Mann family. ( )

"His way of moving, speaking and daydreaming -to Erneste, everything about him seemed utterly superlative"
By sally tarbox on 15 May 2017
Format: Kindle Edition
Set in a grand Swiss hotel, and opening in the 1960s, the main character is Erneste, a quiet, reserved career-waiter. Excellent at his job, Erneste lives a modest and unexciting life, keeping himself to himself. Then one day he receives a letter from someone he hasn't seen for thirty years - Jakob, an attractive younger man, who came to the hotel in the run-up to the War as a trainee.
Sulzer pursues the two narratives simultaneously: Erneste's emotions on getting the letter which seeks practical help; and memories of the long hot summer they met and Erneste fell in love... and how it all panned out.
Against both tales is the constant activity of the hotel, which must always take precedence over their private lives.
This is a concisely - and beautifully- written novel, where every word counts and you really want to see what happens. ( )

C'est une histoire d'amour troublante que nous raconte Sulzer, celle d'un jeune garçon qui ne se remettra jamais de son premier amour. Si l'histoire est relativement lente, avec des moments de tendresse comme de tristesse qui laissent planer un doux-amer, une grisaille qui est le reflet de la vie tamisée d'Ernest, il y a aussi une énorme violence sous-jacente qui menace : que ce soit la raclée que reçoit Ernest, le sort de Max ou la relation entre Klinger et Jacob, ce roman est beaucoup plus puissant que ne laissent paraître le ton et les premiers chapitres. Une vraie découverte. ( )

PARTIAL SPOILER ALERT. DO NOT READ THIS REVIEW UNTIL YOU HAVE READ THE BOOK , OR IF YOU DON"T CARE TO FIND OUT THE BASIC PLOT OF THE STORY.
The bulk of the events in the story happened between 1935 and 1941. Two young men fall in love, but one of them later is unfaithful to his partner due to a third, older, man. So much so that the deceived one is left alone when the other two leave the country. This is the core event of the story. But it stands to reason that what happened once could happen again. If the couple remaining after the first infidelity was itself to suffer a new infidelity, what would be its result? Who would the new third person be? And who would the new betrayer be? You can puzzle this through all you want and see if you end up with any clear answers after finishing reading the story.
Speaking of story, now back to the story: The man who had been deceived the first time is Erneste, who is a waiter. Now his life is quite peaceful by outside indications, but there are hints of the earlier or other traumatic events lurking under his calm and assured professional demeanor. He might have continued on in this way indefinitely but for the arrival of a letter from his first love, Jakob, with whom he had an apparently idyllic relationship until it was shattered by Klinger, the older man.
Erneste hasn't seen Jakob since 1936, but Klinger last saw Jakob in 1941 or 1944, as far as Erneste and the third-person narrator are revealing to us. So after the fled from Erneste and the uncomfortable situation of their discover, what happened to Jakob and Klinger in America between 1936 and 1941? How can Erneste hope to find out?
Erneste's sources in the period after WWII include:
A.) 2 letters from Jakob that Erneste receives in Switzerland in 1953, that say no direct details about the 1936-1941 period. The letters instead concentrate on Jakob asking Erneste to go to Klinger and to ask him for some money to bail him out of financial problems he is experiencing in America.
B.) 2 discussions Erneste has with Klinger about Jakob. Klinger is willing to discuss the whole matter when Erneste gets some time of work and seeks out Klinger, who happens to live not all that far away from him. The mass of information that Klinger provides is quite convincing, and the reader might assume that Erneste takes each bit of information at face value. But I feel that both Erneste and the reader should investigate if Klinger is being entirely honest in his string of divulgations (all of which Erneste has, at first glance, no way of proving or disproving.
C.) Little bits of information he can glean from the Klinger's long-tenured housekeeper who happended to be present in the Klinger menage during the time that that it stayed at the Swiss hotel that Erneste and Jakob worked at in 1935-1936.
Therefore, the reader must ask him or herself if Klinger has told the entire truth about
-the nature and outcome of Jakob's illness.
-whether or not Jakob wrote any letters to Klinger, which Erneste has assumed never occurred, but Klinger never disabuses him of, nor confirms this assumption.
-the entire string of events from 1936-1941. (To me it seems that the narrator is not revealing whether these facts can be verified, but rather reports the speech of Klinger verbatim. Although the book is in the third person, the narrator, if omniscient, is not revealing all that he/she knows. It leaves the reader out on a limb and thus the ending is open-ended to a large extent.)
If as a reader you like neat compact answers, then be prepared for no cut and dried answers from this book. If you like to puzzle through unsolvable enigmas, then read this book. I only ready it two days ago, but I will be trying out solutions to the Klinger revelation for quite some time.