The Waiter
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
“As if The Remains of the Day had been written by Kingsley Amis, The Waiter is…one of the most purely entertaining novels I’ve read in years. This book is a meal you won’t want to finish.” —J. Ryan Stradal, New York Times bestselling author of Kitchens of the Great Midwest
In the tradition of the modern classics The Remains of the Day and A Gentleman in Moscow comes The Waiter, in which the finely tuned balance of a timeworn European restaurant is irrevocably upset by an unexpected guest.
The Hills dates from a time when pigs were pigs and swine were swine, the Maître D’ likes to say—in other words from the mid-1800s. Every day begins with the head waiter putting on his jacket. In with one arm, then the other. Shrugged onto his shoulders. Horn buttons done up. Always the same.
There is clinking. Cutlery is moved around porcelain and up to mouths. But in this universe unto itself, there is scarcely any contact between the tables of regulars. And that is precisely how the waiter likes it. Sheer routine…until a beautiful young woman walks through the door and upsets the delicate balance of the restaurant and all it has come to represent.
Told in a kaleidoscopic rotation of voices—the headwaiter, the bartender, the coat checker, the chef who never speaks—The Waiter marks the North American debut of an exciting new voice in literary fiction that will leave you longing to sit down at The Hills, order a drink, and watch the world go by….
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Faldbakken's English-language debut is an ambitious, contained story set entirely in a grand old restaurant in Oslo called The Hills, narrated by a seasoned waiter over the course of a few gorgeous meals. The waiter and others on the staff the nosy bar manager mixing drinks, the snooty maitre d' sneaking drinks, the silent chef find themselves ever more scandalized by the uncharacteristic behavior of their usually impeccably mannered clientele (one even takes out his phone) after a beautiful young woman joins the intimate setting. The waiter becomes so unsettled by the disruption of his establishment's quotidian rituals that he finds himself in the kitchen smashing all the chef's cherry tomatoes in the garlic press. He is almost completely undone when another patron asks to leave his daughter at the restaurant while he goes on a day trip, but the waiter musters enormous kindness by entertaining the child with an unusual-looking cauliflower. The story is absurd when the scents of two diners mix, it is "equivalent to the miracle of mayonnaise... something completely new and special occurs between them" about nothing, and everything. Faldbakken's story vandalizes the old world the restaurant represents by revealing its inanities, while at the same time eulogizing it by making it his subject, resulting in a clever, striking novel.
