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lisam's review
4.0
I heard about this one on The Librarian Is In and tracked down a used copy immediately. It is very quiet, gently human, and a little sad. Its tone was so different from much of what I read and it was really refreshing to give myself over to another kind of storytelling. Sometimes I didn’t know if the tone came from Fabre’s stylistic choice - the whole novella is an internal monologue - or from the translation. I know some French and I think the answer is likely a bit of both.
davidwright's review
5.0
Not long ago I and a bunch of folks I know read and loved Stewart O’Nan’s Last Night at the Lobster, a beautiful melancholy novella about a restaurant’s last shift, so you know I was intrigued when a friend told me about a book she said was like the French version of O’Nan. Indeed, in many ways the books are doppelgangers: brief, wistful stories of what happens to the staff when the restaurant they work in shuts down. The effect is similar yet also strikingly different, O’Nan’s book set in the bleak midwinter while Fabre’s is more autumnal both in setting and tone. Pierre is the aging barman in a Paris café that seems to have lost its manager. Nobody really knows what is going on, and it is assumed that the boss is off on a fling with the regular waitress, ‘out sick’ with the grippe. To say more would be to give away what little plot there is, in a book that isn’t really about plot at all, but about the wistful, amused, and somewhat lost outlook of its sad clown narrator. Pierre’s gently self-deprecating delivery and disarming candor resists the dramatic, and yet such offhand observations as “All of that to be served chop-chop, with all these people lined up in front of me at the bar, I don’t really know them but I’ve been serving them day after day for a good thirty years,” speak volumes without every raising their voice. Life goes by, the weather changes, a new girl comes on to help out, the commuters come and go, and the bartender listens to the countless confidences of strangers which mean everything and nothing at all. Unlike O’Nan’s American workers, there is less sense of betrayal, with Pierre seeming to accept his life’s limits with a modest Gallic shrug. "I get off at seven but I'm never a stickler about leaving on time, what have I got to do at home? I'm just a barman, and the longer I stay on the more life goes by in the best possible way. So there we are." There we are indeed.
kathijo63's review
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
1.0
An odd little book. I didn’t like any of the characters and didn’t find anything of value in the story.
aligato's review
4.0
This book was beautifully, lightly written. It isn't only a sad book, because there is so much lively insight sprinkled into the dialog Pierre has with himself. I read this in one sitting (it's a tiny book) and although it won't stick with me forever, it's a quick and thought-provoking dip into French culture, the mind of a barman in Paris who has essentially no life, and a man who sees his impending mortality "picking up speed" amidst the building and crumbling lives around him.
danni_faith's review
I find novels about the mundane interesting and quite special, but the copy I read was a terrible translation and that severely lessened my enjoyment of the book.
kcarella's review
3.0
I enjoyed this book, but the author's/translator's sentence structure made me bonkers.
debnanceatreaderbuzz's review against another edition
4.0
Reminiscent of Remains of the Day, The Waitress Was New takes us into the mind of an aging waiter in his last few good years as a working man. He has many years of experience with the world and he has become a philosopher, a psychologist of the best sort, almost a seer, able to predict with surprising accuracy the moves of the weak and the strong. Funny. Thoughtful.
expendablemudge's review against another edition
4.0
The Book Report: Over the course of three days, fifty-six-year-old barman Pierre's life at Le Cercle cafe goes from six-year-long trudge towards retirement to unemployment as his creep of a midlife-crisis-ridden boss apparently abandons wife and business for the arms of a younger woman. Said wife even sends Pierre looking for her husband in all the usual suspects' haunts. Pierre, faithful to his own code of honor, does his best to make the situation work by hunting boss-man down, but comes up empty and reports failure; this is followed by the boss-lady's decision to close the cafe. Temporarily, she says, while she finds her husband and sorts things out.
Pierre, lacking other commitments and entanglements in his life, watches over the bar, lets the food and liquor delivery people in, wipes his spotless bar down, and watches his regulars drink and eat at La Rotonde, the competing bar across the square. At the end of a week of this useless work, plus the more useful work of getting his pension paperwork in order (four and a half years to go until the full ride is achieved), Pierre gets the call: The boss and wife are in Saint-Malo, starting afresh, and they've agreed to sell Le Cercle to someone else. The staff will be paid to the end of the month, and goodbye.
So what does Pierre do? He opens up. He serves the regulars, the staff, all comers, on the house. Why not? He's been screwed out of a safe and secure position, one he does well, and so why not do it one last time? Then he goes home. And because he can't think of anything else to do, he goes to bed. Fin.
My Review: How wonderful to read a book like this, short and to the point, one that allows me the reader to discover what kind of person the narrator/PoV character is without being spoon-fed opinions by a mistrustful author.
How interesting to be a fly on the wall behind the bar looking on as a business, a thriving one, loses its anchor and spins out of control. How pleasurable to see that not all the occupants of this anchorless business flee like rats from a sinking ship; the staunchness of the narrator is made up from equal parts honor and lack of imagination, which he sort of vaguely realizes.
And how very ordinary a man he is: Old enough to have weathered midlife, too young to view retirement with equanimity, still alive enough to notice the lack of a love in his life, and yet not vital enough to break the deadhanded grip of his difficult past (adopted at ten by the woman he still thinks of as his mother, dead these 12 years) and participate fully in the emotional life of the world. In short, there are millions of him walking around, a part of one small segment of the world yet apart from all the main channels of life.
The new waitress of the title replaced the waitress that the boss was having an affair with for two and more years. She started on Monday, and by Wednesday the cafe had closed. She lived in the farthest reaches of Paris, traveled over an hour to get to the job, and she was already tired of the job. Pierre reports these facts, he comments on them only in the briefest passages, but the reader feels, thanks to deft authorial choices made by the translator, the whole history of Pierre's life in the short transit of the new girl: He's always in transit, is Pierre, always looking at the ground he's standing on, waiting for it to root him, when he can't imagine how he should send down his own roots.
What a joy it was to read this book. Please, do the same for yourself, and revel in the short moment of being treated to a close look at someone more like you than is probably comfortable to view, and at the same time as the adult you certainly are at this point in your reading life.
Pierre, lacking other commitments and entanglements in his life, watches over the bar, lets the food and liquor delivery people in, wipes his spotless bar down, and watches his regulars drink and eat at La Rotonde, the competing bar across the square. At the end of a week of this useless work, plus the more useful work of getting his pension paperwork in order (four and a half years to go until the full ride is achieved), Pierre gets the call: The boss and wife are in Saint-Malo, starting afresh, and they've agreed to sell Le Cercle to someone else. The staff will be paid to the end of the month, and goodbye.
So what does Pierre do? He opens up. He serves the regulars, the staff, all comers, on the house. Why not? He's been screwed out of a safe and secure position, one he does well, and so why not do it one last time? Then he goes home. And because he can't think of anything else to do, he goes to bed. Fin.
My Review: How wonderful to read a book like this, short and to the point, one that allows me the reader to discover what kind of person the narrator/PoV character is without being spoon-fed opinions by a mistrustful author.
How interesting to be a fly on the wall behind the bar looking on as a business, a thriving one, loses its anchor and spins out of control. How pleasurable to see that not all the occupants of this anchorless business flee like rats from a sinking ship; the staunchness of the narrator is made up from equal parts honor and lack of imagination, which he sort of vaguely realizes.
And how very ordinary a man he is: Old enough to have weathered midlife, too young to view retirement with equanimity, still alive enough to notice the lack of a love in his life, and yet not vital enough to break the deadhanded grip of his difficult past (adopted at ten by the woman he still thinks of as his mother, dead these 12 years) and participate fully in the emotional life of the world. In short, there are millions of him walking around, a part of one small segment of the world yet apart from all the main channels of life.
The new waitress of the title replaced the waitress that the boss was having an affair with for two and more years. She started on Monday, and by Wednesday the cafe had closed. She lived in the farthest reaches of Paris, traveled over an hour to get to the job, and she was already tired of the job. Pierre reports these facts, he comments on them only in the briefest passages, but the reader feels, thanks to deft authorial choices made by the translator, the whole history of Pierre's life in the short transit of the new girl: He's always in transit, is Pierre, always looking at the ground he's standing on, waiting for it to root him, when he can't imagine how he should send down his own roots.
What a joy it was to read this book. Please, do the same for yourself, and revel in the short moment of being treated to a close look at someone more like you than is probably comfortable to view, and at the same time as the adult you certainly are at this point in your reading life.
mlytylr's review against another edition
3.0
so, so french.
"all in all, he seemed like a kid who needed a blowjob and then a mars bar, or maybe even both at the same time."
"all in all, he seemed like a kid who needed a blowjob and then a mars bar, or maybe even both at the same time."