Title: A Perfect Waiter
First published: 2008
Description: Erneste is the perfect waiter―and his private life seems to embody the qualities he brings to his profession. But inwardly this polite and dignified man is in the grip of a violent passion, aroused thirty years before, when he fell in love with a young waiter-in-training named Jakob. Jakob broke his heart when he fled Nazi-dominated Europe for a new life in America with his lover, Julius Klinger, a celebrated German intellectual. Nursing his wounds, Erneste slinks even deeper into his well-ordered world, hardening into what had only previously been a role. And then, after decades of silence, he receives a letter from a distraught and penniless Jakob asking for help. And Ernest must decide if he will finally take action. Set against the backdrop of a genteel Swiss hotel, and moving skillfully between two time periods, this exquisitely written story of a lifelong passion is rich in tension and emotion, exploring the nature of love and betrayal, memory, and regret.
Subjects: Gay men, Gay couples, Fiction, Sexual behavior, Waiters, Hotels, Fiction, romance, general, Switzerland, fiction, LGBTQ novels, Stonewall Book Awards, Kellner, Belletristische Darstellung, Homosexueller, Liebesbeziehung, Fiction, psychological, Man-woman relationships, fiction, Fiction, historical, general, Gay men, fiction
Places: Switzerland, United States
LC classification: PT2681.U575 P4713 2008