Then one day he receives a letter from someone he hasn't seen for thirty years - Jakob, an attractive younger man, who came to the hotel in the run-up to the War as a trainee.Sulzer pursues the two narratives simultaneously: Erneste's emotions on getting the letter which seeks practical help and memories of the long hot summer they met and Erneste fell in love.
Excellent at his job, Erneste lives a modest and unexciting life, keeping himself to himself. "His way of moving, speaking and daydreaming -to Erneste, everything about him seemed utterly superlative"By sally tarbox on Format: Kindle EditionSet in a grand Swiss hotel, and opening in the 1960s, the main character is Erneste, a quiet, reserved career-waiter. My only serious problem with the book is that it's a bit too easy to see where the story is likely to go if you know something about the real Mann family. But his publisher would have sent the manuscript back if he'd missed out the obligatory gay-bashing scene, so that's probably forgivable. In the thirties flashbacks he takes it for granted that we know who Hitler was and why some Germans chose to go into exile in the sixties chapters he sketches in the Dürrenmattish Swiss-noir atmosphere with a fairly light touch, but perhaps tries a bit too hard to show us that it wasn't entirely straightforward to live as a gay man in sixties Switzerland. But, one day in 1966, an unexpected letter forces him to deal with the memory of the great, unhappy love affair of his life, and to confront the ageing writer Julius Klinger (a rather thinly-disguised Thomas Mann lookalike) who, thirty years ago, had waltzed off to America with the beautiful Jakob, with whom Erneste had shared two delightfully hot and sweaty summers of passion in between shifts in the staff bedroom they shared in a mountain hotel where the exiled Klinger and his family were guests.This could all be a bit predictable, but Sulzer for the most part manages to avoid labouring the obvious. Erneste is a middle-aged man, apparently quite contented with his solitary life and his career as a waiter in the best restaurant of a Swiss lakeside town. Ein perfekter Kellner - which rather oddly doesn't seem to have been made into a film yet - works a bit like a gay, Swiss Remains of the day.
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