![]() ![]() The truth about Jakob that most shocks, when it eventually emerges, is not his immorality but his amorality. He takes Jakob under his professional wing, only to fall hopelessly, obsessively, and disastrously in love with him. ![]() ![]() An impeccably discreet and entirely self-effacing member of the waiting staff at the Restaurant am Berg in the Swiss lake resort of Giessbach, Erneste sees his calm and uneventful life turned upside down by the arrival of a young trainee-waiter from Germany. The novel travels back and forth in time between the mid-1930s and mid-1960s, and in place between Switzerland and the United States, following the life of Erneste, the eponymous perfect waiter (known to all as ‘Monsieur Erneste’). Like Wilde’s Dorian Gray, Jakob’s beauty masks an ugly deceit and those who succumb to his seductive charms are as doomed as Gray’s hapless admirers. Certainly it does not apply in the case of beautiful nineteen-year-old waiter, Jakob Meier, the dark heart of Alain Claude Sulzer’s compelling novel A Perfect Waiter. His poetic conceit, whilst charming, is neither totally accurate nor universally applicable. ![]()
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