A book by Alain Claude Sulzer
Alain Claude Sulzer, born in 1953, is a writer living in Basel and Alsace. Sulzer’s highly acclaimed novel A Perfect Waiter was published in 2006 and was awarded the Prix Médicis étranger in France in 2008.

The story:
Monsieur Erneste is a waiter in a grand Swiss hotel. Attentive, unobtrusive, impeccable — a perfect waiter. In the 35 years of his career, he has changed jobs only once.
Only two decisive events interrupted the monotony of decades of serving, setting up and clearing away:
his great love for Jakob, a 19-year-old apprentice waiter, which ended after a year of happiness,
and the arrival of a letter from America thirty years later, which made the long span of time between the two seem to shrink, as if “thirty years had passed like a day.”

In this letter, Jakob — who had left him so shamefully to follow a former hotel guest, the famous writer Julius Klinger, to New York as his secretary and secret lover — asks him for a brazen favour.

Pages: 214
Language: German