The happiness and joy surging through him. Still, he harbors a strange presentiment, a vague sense of something incomprehensible that lurks behind his excitement in the form of a threat that risks derailing In a world where passion becomes a dangerous slaveholder, Erneste never anticipates such an unexpected end. It isn't long before they are spending nights making love in Erneste's cramped attic room, their secretive couplings by the shores of the lake only fuelling Erneste's yearnings for the nights to come and his longings for ever more physical contact with his young muse. In 1935, when the young German trainee waiter came from Cologne for a spell of employment in Switzerland in order to avoid being drafted into the Wehrmacht.īuoyed along by his desires and need to care for the boy, Erneste shows him everything a waiter needs to know as he battles with his illicit desires. The past has been locked away in his abundant recollections, 'like something inside a dark closet,' like a precious commodity, but now Erneste's thoughts have begun to stray constantly with a secret that he is unable or unwilling to share with anyone else: 'like a hand reaching for him, its pressure is neither heavy nor light.'Įven the photos he kept of Jakob are out of reach, as remote as Jakob's breath, even more remote than the memories of their time together at Giessbach

Now Jakob's letter suddenly unleashes Erneste's furtive yearnings, making him relive the weight of loss and the hurtful way that the beautiful Jakob abandoned him for America. Considered the most dependable member of an ever-changing staff, he's never taken a sick day and never asked for time off. There's a hint of financial problems, and as the words fracture and splinter upon the page, Erneste realizes that after all these years, Jakob seems to be begging his friend for help.įor sixteen years, the shadow-like Erneste has gone through life working as a waiter at the Restaurant am Berg.

With a soul touched by ice, 'frozen and terrified, ' Erneste's solitary life is shaken out of a slumber when he receives a letter from Jakob from New York. Forster, even Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, the central protagonist of A Perfect Waiter plays out his ageless love affair with doomed,Įven operatic grandeur on a stage of isolation and loneliness as he remembers his time with Jakob Meier, a man who was his best and dearest friend thirty years ago, back in the summer of 1935. Book review: Alain Claude Sulzer's *A Perfect Waiter*ĭeeply reminiscent of the works of E.M.

A Perfect Waiter by Alain Claude Sulzer