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 Amédée 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. (Feb.)
Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information
School Library Journal
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 Amédée 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. (Feb.)
Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information
Kirkus Reviews
After decades of listening to his patrons' life stories, a bartender shares his own in the first of French author Fabre's novels to be published in the United States. Pierre has been at Le Cercle, a cafe in the Parisian suburb of Asnieres, for eight years. Before that, the 56-year-old tended bar at several other places, fell in love a few times, married and divorced once. He now lives alone and sometimes wonders if he will ever have another woman. The conscientious worker has little time to dwell on private matters, however, because Sabrina, Le Cercle's waitress, is out sick with the flu. Henri, the cafe's owner, has hired a temporary waitress. When she arrives, Pierre is relieved to see that she is good at her job. Despite Sabrina's absence, the day will be just like other days, Pierre thinks. Then Pierre's boss slips out the back door and things get complicated. Henri's wife Isabelle believes he is having an affair with Sabrina; he has strayed before. But when Pierre borrows Isabelle's Audi to help resolve the crisis, he finds that Sabrina really is sick, and Henri is not there. With this low-key material, Fabre eloquently conveys the wisdom of a man forever in the background, observing the lives of others. When Isabella closes the cafe, Pierre is left wondering how much longer he will need to keep working before he can claim his pension. Simply and elegantly captures the dignity of a day's work, the humanity of friendship and the loneliness of aging.
From the Publisher
A slim, whisper of a book that speaks to aging, solitude and the need for human contact, it feels like a philosophy primer for the meaning of life. A short read with a long tail impact.”
—Monica Carter, Three Percent
“A tiny miracle like a perfect cup of coffee or just the right wine . . . It’s a minor classic, a charming little book, a short account of ordinary goings-on in a French café that some highfalutin reader might call a deceptively detached exploration of the quotidian. It’s the sort of book you can’t wait to find again, and for others to find it for the first time.”
—Daniel Handler, author of A Series of Unfortunate Events under pen name Lemony Snicket
“The strong, intimate voice of this gentle, canny narrator continues to stay with us long after we reach the end of The Waitress Was New—what an engrossing, captivating tale, in Jordan Stump’s sensitive translation.”
—Lydia Davis
“For his U.S. debut, Fabre offers a poignantly funny, slender slice of a French waiter’s life . . . In his patient, deliberative layering, the details of Pierre’s quotidian life assume an affecting solidity and significance.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Simply and elegantly captures the dignity of a day’s work, the humanity of friendship and the loneliness of aging.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“A sweetly comic book, savored with tristesse, lightly renders feeling and profundity in the manner only the French can.”
—Reamy Jansen, Bloomsbury Review
“Fabre becomes the lyrical, compassionate spectator of all these infinitesimal, silent lives—our lives—as they move between leaving the suburban underground station and arriving home. It is a tiny fragment of life, simply told and yet touching in the extreme. When Fabre writes, he ‘really believes in the possibility of showing you genuine beauty, genuine dignity and places or people that have been somehow overlooked.’ Mission accomplished.”
—French Book News
