![]() ![]() Back in the pre-Holocaust summer of 1935, the guests whom the then-young waiter devoted himself to serving and observing were of course not mere holidaymakers, but the first wave of well-heeled refugees fleeing the rise of Hitler. Its meticulously ordered world of bourgeois pretension is as apparently calm as the lake itself, but the arrival of the letter stirs up some ominously dark undercurrents in Erneste's memories. ![]() When we find out the answers to those questions - well, this is a story which it would be wrong to spoil by giving away too much in a review.Įrneste has spent his 30 years of waiting in the dining room of the Grand Hotel, a superior establishment perched high above the shores of a Swiss lake. By the time he comes to open it, 15 pages later, Alain Claude Sulzer's disquieting narration has done two marvellous things: Erneste's life as the perfect waiter of the title has been expertly and entirely evoked, and the reader is completely intrigued to know both what's in the letter and why the sight of the handwriting on the envelope alone is enough to tear open his heart. ![]() The story opens with a classic hook: on September 15, 1966, a perfectly ordinary little man called Erneste receives a letter from someone he hasn't seen for 30 years. ![]()
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