The Waitress Was New
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
This “charming . . . short account of ordinary goings-on in a French café” explores love, work, loneliness, and aging as it follows the daily life of a middle-aged Parisian bartender (Lemony Snicket)
Pierre is a veteran bartender in a café in the outskirts of Paris. He observes his customers as they come and go—the young man who drinks beer as he reads Primo Levi, the fellow who from time-to-time strips down and plunges into the nearby Seine, the few regulars who eat and drink there on credit—sizing them up with great accuracy and empathy. Pierre doesn’t look outside more than necessary; he prefers to let the world come to him.
Soon, however, the café must close its doors, and Pierre finds himself at a loss. As we follow his stream of thoughts over three days, Pierre’s humanity and profound solitude both emerge. The Waitress Was New is a moving portrait of human anguish and weakness, of understated nobility and strength.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
For his U.S. debut, Fabre offers a poignantly funny, slender slice of a French waiter's life. Pierre, 56 and divorced, has worked at the suburban Parisian cafe Le Cercle for so long that he's become a fixture. He's a good listener, too, particularly to the boss's wife, heartbroken over her husband's seeming affair with the young head waitress, Sabrina. As a long shift unrolls, the boss and Sabrina are absent from the busy cafe, leaving Senegalese cook Am d e fuming and Pierre and the title's fill-in waitress scrambling. The next day brings big changes, and loyal, orderly Pierre must suddenly measure out his mortality by the pay stubs he has hoarded over his working life. In Fabre's patient, deliberative layering, the details of Pierre's quotidian life assume an affecting solidity and significance.
