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La Mesera Era Nueva / The New Waitress (Ficciones / Fictions)
La Mesera Era Nueva / The New Waitress La Mesera Era Nueva / The New Waitress
128 pages, Paperback
First published August 1, 2005
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547 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 109 reviews
November 10, 2021
“I’m only a barman.”
A slice of ordinary life here in this short novella. I listened to the audio version in English translation. The novel is told from the perspective of Pierre, a 56-year-old bachelor who has worked as a barman, on and off, since he was 19. At first the reader thinks he is a bang ordinary guy, but as the book progresses there are several hints of a troubled past. He’s a bit of a contradiction, in that he feels lonely living by himself, but he also seems to shy away from close human contact. His job as a barman suits him well, since he likes fulfilling the traditional barman’s role of providing a listening ear without getting actively involved in other people’s lives. All of the bar’s regulars call Pierre by his first name, but they don’t really know him.
Pierre doesn’t have much to look forward to at home, so his job is enormously important to him. The story is based around a period of a few days in which his boss (the bar owner) mysteriously disappears, and the crisis this causes for the bar. For all of his past problems, the older Pierre is a very conscientious employee.
Throughout the book we get Pierre’s internal monologues, during which he addresses himself as “Pierrot mon ami”. Towards the end he says he will read that novel one day. I've also not read it, and I got the impression I might have been missing some cultural references. There are also quite a lot of references to the geography of the Paris area, and someone who knows the city well would get more from that than I did. If I picked up the audio correctly, Pierre’s bar is in the suburb of Asnières.
The novel reminded me of another I read a while back, “Last Night at the Lobster” by Stewart O’Nan. Clearly this type of thing appeals to me! (Maybe it’s my age).
I really enjoyed the book. I thought the author created a really good character in Pierre. Life’s been a struggle for him, but in that respect at least, he’s not alone.
A slice of ordinary life here in this short novella. I listened to the audio version in English translation. The novel is told from the perspective of Pierre, a 56-year-old bachelor who has worked as a barman, on and off, since he was 19. At first the reader thinks he is a bang ordinary guy, but as the book progresses there are several hints of a troubled past. He’s a bit of a contradiction, in that he feels lonely living by himself, but he also seems to shy away from close human contact. His job as a barman suits him well, since he likes fulfilling the traditional barman’s role of providing a listening ear without getting actively involved in other people’s lives. All of the bar’s regulars call Pierre by his first name, but they don’t really know him.
Pierre doesn’t have much to look forward to at home, so his job is enormously important to him. The story is based around a period of a few days in which his boss (the bar owner) mysteriously disappears, and the crisis this causes for the bar. For all of his past problems, the older Pierre is a very conscientious employee.
Throughout the book we get Pierre’s internal monologues, during which he addresses himself as “Pierrot mon ami”. Towards the end he says he will read that novel one day. I've also not read it, and I got the impression I might have been missing some cultural references. There are also quite a lot of references to the geography of the Paris area, and someone who knows the city well would get more from that than I did. If I picked up the audio correctly, Pierre’s bar is in the suburb of Asnières.
The novel reminded me of another I read a while back, “Last Night at the Lobster” by Stewart O’Nan. Clearly this type of thing appeals to me! (Maybe it’s my age).
I really enjoyed the book. I thought the author created a really good character in Pierre. Life’s been a struggle for him, but in that respect at least, he’s not alone.
March 9, 2022
‘The Waitress Was New’ focuses in on three days in the life of Pierre an aging bartender in a not wholly fashionable bar. Pierre is just three years away from his retirement. I'd just watched ‘Love Me Strangely’(1971), one totally weird movie, and unsuccessfully tried to get a copy of ‘Un Beau Monstre’, the book that gave birth to that movie. As a result, I just had to try this, another of the author’s novels. I loved it. Nothing much happens throughout the hundred or so pages, but it says so much, and I found myself unable to put it down. Fabre really captures people in their everyday lives.
I have already acquired another of his novels and am desperately trying to keep it from climbing up my TBR list.
I have already acquired another of his novels and am desperately trying to keep it from climbing up my TBR list.
February 14, 2012
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.
August 24, 2019
An interesting novella about an ageing café waiter working and living in the outskirts of Paris.
January 31, 2022
I enjoyed this novella encompassing a few days in the life of Pierre, a 56-year-old bartender in the northern suburbs of Paris, as circumstances upend the life of careful routine that sustains him. There's not much of a plot, but Fabre's stream of consciousness style pulled me right into Pierre's insightful observations of his co-workers and customers, his memories of problems and pleasures of years gone by, and the disquiet he feels facing an uncertain future, past his prime and alone.
If you're so inclined, and with a nod to French literature's emphasis on philosophy, you could use Sartre's concept of "bad faith" as a lens to examine whether Pierre is guilty of avoiding his freedom to choose to be other than the bartender he identifies as, comparing and contrasting with his example of a waiter in Being and Nothingness. I didn't, but you could.
If you're so inclined, and with a nod to French literature's emphasis on philosophy, you could use Sartre's concept of "bad faith" as a lens to examine whether Pierre is guilty of avoiding his freedom to choose to be other than the bartender he identifies as, comparing and contrasting with his example of a waiter in Being and Nothingness. I didn't, but you could.
July 18, 2020
Fabre is a French novelist. He has written a lot, from the looks of it, but English translations are slow in coming. His biographical data reveal that he chooses to focus on describing life on the periphery, on neglected people in society. For this slim novel, the main character works as a barman. As a pastiche of small, mundane observations and events, it is not terribly striking or memorable. I did find that it conveyed an appealing atmosphere of lower class European existence. His style is conversational, almost awkwardly so, and he dispenses with modern formalism. Instead, the thoughts of the narrator flow into the descriptions, and the setting takes on an ethereal quality. Unfortunately, it was over quickly, and culminated in nothing more than an accurate snapshot of an ordinary life. Perhaps too accurate.
May 23, 2014
This was a perfect little novella about 3 days of a barman in a French cafe. He is proud of his work, and goes above and beyond to do a good job. "Let the world turn around us, beyond our spotless bars, in the end every day will be carefully wiped away to make room for the next". He believes he performs a valuable service, so when the bar is closed because the owner has a mid-life crisis and disappears, he is lost. What does a 57 year old barman do when he's too young for French social security, but too old to start over?
We get inside the mind of Pierre and find an intelligent, caring, intuitive and lonely man. It's a good place to be for a while.
We get inside the mind of Pierre and find an intelligent, caring, intuitive and lonely man. It's a good place to be for a while.
July 1, 2020
I am sitting at home these days working harder than ever before - fourteen hour days. Appears people think you are at home ( weekend... weekdays ... shouldn’t matter ). Just set up that MS Teams conference call. I only have physical meetings with my living room walls which have heard me out patiently. If virus don’t kill you ... ennui must ... what ... no .. it’s not ennui ... therapeutically driving oneself to think it’s good work ... doesn’t feel that way though.
What’s this got to do with this nice quick read by Dominique Fabre. He does the same thing above except in a bar ... watching the world go by ... seeing guests’ emotions ... boss’ wife’s anxieties ..... and some more. Why was I attracted to this ? I am into this phase of liking everything about Paris ( including learning French ) and gathering information about great places to visit in this famous city. A story about a bartender in Paris who just watches his life go by was too good to give up in this mood.
Not sure there is more to say about this book but I liked it I think.
What’s this got to do with this nice quick read by Dominique Fabre. He does the same thing above except in a bar ... watching the world go by ... seeing guests’ emotions ... boss’ wife’s anxieties ..... and some more. Why was I attracted to this ? I am into this phase of liking everything about Paris ( including learning French ) and gathering information about great places to visit in this famous city. A story about a bartender in Paris who just watches his life go by was too good to give up in this mood.
Not sure there is more to say about this book but I liked it I think.
July 21, 2022
56 year old Pierre has been a waiter all his working life, and at the Parisian cafe, Le Cercle, for eight years. During that time he has listened to his customers’ life stories, and now, he tells his own.
This is a simple tale, an easy and short read, and yet a hugely appealing one.
With a restless boss, whose wife can’t make her mind up what she wants, it is Pierre who in effect steers the ship, and ensures the smooth running of the bar.
Fabre’s writing puts the reader in the cafe, sat with a glass of red observing all around.
It’s a gentle story that addresses serious matters; the importance of friendship, the loneliness of aging, and the value of a hard day’s work.
This is a simple tale, an easy and short read, and yet a hugely appealing one.
With a restless boss, whose wife can’t make her mind up what she wants, it is Pierre who in effect steers the ship, and ensures the smooth running of the bar.
Fabre’s writing puts the reader in the cafe, sat with a glass of red observing all around.
It’s a gentle story that addresses serious matters; the importance of friendship, the loneliness of aging, and the value of a hard day’s work.
August 7, 2021
Lovely quick but thoughtful read.
September 2, 2020
A snapshot of an ordinary life, rather than a story with a beginning a middle and an end. Very low key - my kind of book when done well, as this one is.
September 1, 2016
I came to The Waitress Was New through the website Three Percent's "Best Translated Book of 2008" longlist (here, if you're interested). Narrated by Pierre, a fifty-six year old barman in a cafe on the outskirts of Paris, Waitress provides a quick and quiet glimpse into the life of a man who has spent his life observing others and catering to their whims, but is only just starting to develop the same acute awareness of himself.
Pierre is profoundly alone—a state which only occasionally seems to concern him. He has drinks once in awhile with a barman friend from his neighborhood, waters his boss' plants when he's out of town, grocery shops for his upstairs neighbor, and decides what to read based on the selections of a regular customer. He is a consummate listener, but--as is the case with many such professional confidants—has almost no idea how to respond on the rare occasion that someone actually asks his own opinion.
There are a few images towards the end of the novella that were so beautiful that I kept reading as I got off the subway and walked to my office. Pierre's boss unexpectedly closes the cafe for a week, but Pierre, left at loose ends, continues to go into work every morning, mopping down the bar top and watching as people go in and out of the train station across the street. The image of an aging barman—locked in an empty cafe and watching passersby—seems to me the most poetic rendering of solitude, spectatorship, and quotidian ritual that fiction has produced in some time.
Pierre is profoundly alone—a state which only occasionally seems to concern him. He has drinks once in awhile with a barman friend from his neighborhood, waters his boss' plants when he's out of town, grocery shops for his upstairs neighbor, and decides what to read based on the selections of a regular customer. He is a consummate listener, but--as is the case with many such professional confidants—has almost no idea how to respond on the rare occasion that someone actually asks his own opinion.
There are a few images towards the end of the novella that were so beautiful that I kept reading as I got off the subway and walked to my office. Pierre's boss unexpectedly closes the cafe for a week, but Pierre, left at loose ends, continues to go into work every morning, mopping down the bar top and watching as people go in and out of the train station across the street. The image of an aging barman—locked in an empty cafe and watching passersby—seems to me the most poetic rendering of solitude, spectatorship, and quotidian ritual that fiction has produced in some time.
April 28, 2011
just had an email to say this is in at the library (after an eon of waiting) but as they're closed today and I can't make it tomorrow, and then it's Easter it will be next week before I'm 'currently reading'.
But am looking forward to this, not least because the protagonist is 56, same age as me, and maybe the resonance will resonate and I will be resonating all round the place.
A lovely book, both in terms of the elegant cover and square pages (although I found it hard to read the blurb) and the novel itself: a meditation on growing older, a little regretful but also philosophical about life. (Of course 56 is no age at all). This quiet man watches all that goes on around him - the love affairs and worries of others, absorbing as a barman must do (one of his customers is reading Primo Levi's 'If This is a Man' and he buys it), and rarely being listened to himself, except of course by the readers of this book. He tries to help out the new waitress and the boss's wife (the boss mysteriously disappears, probably having an affair), and to comfort himself: he has broken up with his wife, and has an illness that calls for antibiotics, calling himself 'Pierrot my friend' and dreaming of some of the women he sees (although he finds he can't masturbate, which worries him). He washes his clothes, catches a bus, wipes down tables, a close concern for the mundane runs through the book - I like that. You grow fond of him, his well meaning acts of kindness, his attempt to keep his dignity.. at least I did. You wish he could have his wish:
I’d rather not have to come out from behind my bar at all, but there’s no getting around it, life is still on the other side.
One thing that did annoy me though - he talks about imminent retirement. I want to retire. I'm his age, why can't I retire! (Got another 9 years to go)...
But am looking forward to this, not least because the protagonist is 56, same age as me, and maybe the resonance will resonate and I will be resonating all round the place.
A lovely book, both in terms of the elegant cover and square pages (although I found it hard to read the blurb) and the novel itself: a meditation on growing older, a little regretful but also philosophical about life. (Of course 56 is no age at all). This quiet man watches all that goes on around him - the love affairs and worries of others, absorbing as a barman must do (one of his customers is reading Primo Levi's 'If This is a Man' and he buys it), and rarely being listened to himself, except of course by the readers of this book. He tries to help out the new waitress and the boss's wife (the boss mysteriously disappears, probably having an affair), and to comfort himself: he has broken up with his wife, and has an illness that calls for antibiotics, calling himself 'Pierrot my friend' and dreaming of some of the women he sees (although he finds he can't masturbate, which worries him). He washes his clothes, catches a bus, wipes down tables, a close concern for the mundane runs through the book - I like that. You grow fond of him, his well meaning acts of kindness, his attempt to keep his dignity.. at least I did. You wish he could have his wish:
I’d rather not have to come out from behind my bar at all, but there’s no getting around it, life is still on the other side.
One thing that did annoy me though - he talks about imminent retirement. I want to retire. I'm his age, why can't I retire! (Got another 9 years to go)...
August 12, 2019
"I shook hands with a few regulars I'd got to know over the years without really trying to. They're here, they come in for a drink, a bite to eat, they read the bar's newspaper. They never forget where they are, or all the things they have to do, but for a few minutes, maybe an hour or two, they put themselves between parentheses..." (32).
As someone who has put myself between parentheses in various cafes over the years, I very much like that turn of phrase.
As someone who has put myself between parentheses in various cafes over the years, I very much like that turn of phrase.
April 2, 2016
A character study that is easy on the eye and brain. Reminded me a little of Remains of the Day. Both have an old narrator going over his years of service. However, it's not as great as Ishiguro's novel.
December 4, 2014
A barman. Alone. Facing life. Like everyone. An elegant meaningless little book.
April 13, 2019
Un macaron. Perfect for café reading.
March 29, 2017
"You really are a useful thing in other people's lives when you're a barman."
First a micro-review of this micro-book: Not much of a story, no overt message, yet a good read: well-captured everyday life, unadorned with literary frills.
Dominique Fabre's novella The Waitress Was New (2005) with its 110 half-size pages may be - gasp! - a bit short even for me. However, what is does not exhibit in terms of volume it makes up by being thoroughly unusual: the novella is a quiet celebration of the ordinariness of everyday life. People's behaviors and characterizations are the focus and there is only a slightest whisper of what might be considered a "story."
For Pierre, the narrator, a lonely aging barman in Café Le Cercle in Paris, working the bar is the only sense and focus of his existence. While hints are dropped as to his dramatic past: divorce(s), drugs, serious illness, Pierre is almost serene these days. Not that he is actually happy: he is just accustomed to a tolerable degree of unhappiness. No dreams, no hopes, but also no major worries, except for anxieties about not having secured enough work credits for the full pension after almost forty years of employment.
Quiet, peaceful life filled with listening to the bar patrons' troubled stories, observing their behavior, reading Primo Levi's books in the evenings, and conversing with his long dead mother. In the tiny wisp of a plot his boss' marital life is in trouble and Pierre, rather unsuccessfully, is trying to offer emotional support to the boss' wife. The thinness of the story emphasizes that anything that "happens" is really incidental to the melancholy account of Pierre's days who is already sort of on the other side, seemingly resigned to the fact that he will spend the remaining years of his life occupied with waiting for death.
Good, extremely short read, which at first does not feel depressing. This comes later - I am sure that's precisely what the author intended - when the reader reflects on what it means to be old and completely lonely. One will not find much solace in this book, but why should one: life is a pretty grim business and the end comes too soon.
Three and a quarter stars.
First a micro-review of this micro-book: Not much of a story, no overt message, yet a good read: well-captured everyday life, unadorned with literary frills.
Dominique Fabre's novella The Waitress Was New (2005) with its 110 half-size pages may be - gasp! - a bit short even for me. However, what is does not exhibit in terms of volume it makes up by being thoroughly unusual: the novella is a quiet celebration of the ordinariness of everyday life. People's behaviors and characterizations are the focus and there is only a slightest whisper of what might be considered a "story."
For Pierre, the narrator, a lonely aging barman in Café Le Cercle in Paris, working the bar is the only sense and focus of his existence. While hints are dropped as to his dramatic past: divorce(s), drugs, serious illness, Pierre is almost serene these days. Not that he is actually happy: he is just accustomed to a tolerable degree of unhappiness. No dreams, no hopes, but also no major worries, except for anxieties about not having secured enough work credits for the full pension after almost forty years of employment.
Quiet, peaceful life filled with listening to the bar patrons' troubled stories, observing their behavior, reading Primo Levi's books in the evenings, and conversing with his long dead mother. In the tiny wisp of a plot his boss' marital life is in trouble and Pierre, rather unsuccessfully, is trying to offer emotional support to the boss' wife. The thinness of the story emphasizes that anything that "happens" is really incidental to the melancholy account of Pierre's days who is already sort of on the other side, seemingly resigned to the fact that he will spend the remaining years of his life occupied with waiting for death.
Good, extremely short read, which at first does not feel depressing. This comes later - I am sure that's precisely what the author intended - when the reader reflects on what it means to be old and completely lonely. One will not find much solace in this book, but why should one: life is a pretty grim business and the end comes too soon.
Three and a quarter stars.
April 18, 2008
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.
February 13, 2012
A veteran bartender of Le Cercle, Pierre, lives a simple life. He is the unassuming listener of customer stories and covers up for the boss of the cafe when he disappears for a day or two with his latest fling, and helps out at the cafe until he returns.
On the day a new waitress is hired at the cafe, the boss disappears in the afternoon without word to his wife or Pierre. Bu this time he doesn't come back the day after, or in a week. In the meantime, Pierre has to suddenly not only manage the cafe, the new waitress and the cook, but he is also put in the position of suddenly being the boss's wife's confidant and having to comfort her.
Oh and he's worried enough to try looking for his boss as well. Before long, his life is thrown into upheaval at an unexpected announcement and he takes stock of his life on a day he had not seen coming.
This poignant study of Pierre and his solitude highlights a person who is overlooked, but who is also at times taken advantage of.
On the day a new waitress is hired at the cafe, the boss disappears in the afternoon without word to his wife or Pierre. Bu this time he doesn't come back the day after, or in a week. In the meantime, Pierre has to suddenly not only manage the cafe, the new waitress and the cook, but he is also put in the position of suddenly being the boss's wife's confidant and having to comfort her.
Oh and he's worried enough to try looking for his boss as well. Before long, his life is thrown into upheaval at an unexpected announcement and he takes stock of his life on a day he had not seen coming.
This poignant study of Pierre and his solitude highlights a person who is overlooked, but who is also at times taken advantage of.
June 6, 2009
Pierre is a divorced 56-year-old barman in a Parisian cafe who has come to find the cafe a sort of home and safety net for himself. He knows the customers and he studies them, often living vicariously through their lives, or, barring that, taking cues from them as he witnesses them. It's a quick read, just over 100 pages, and told entirely from inside Pierre's mind. He considers himself a "fixture" in the cafe, so when changes occur around him he finds himself needing to rethink his place in life and what he wants out of it.
This was a nice book. "Quaint" is really the best word to come to mind. Subtle, but impactful.
This was a nice book. "Quaint" is really the best word to come to mind. Subtle, but impactful.
Read
January 7, 2017Pierre is an experienced bartender in a cafe in the outskirts of Paris. This book cover a little over a week in his life. It is the story of an unremarkable life, an individual on the fringe of society and his interaction with his customers and fellow employees. This book captures the dignity of work, the all too human interaction in his life and the loneliness of aging. This slender book is a poignant, funny and above all sensitive look at one man's life.
March 11, 2013
A nice little short French novella with a soft, persistent narrator. It was like looking through a microscope, rather than a telescope, and was a worthy bus and coffee companion today.
I chose it because it was short and the author's surname was the one closest to my own when shelved. A pleasant surprise for a random shelf pick!
I chose it because it was short and the author's surname was the one closest to my own when shelved. A pleasant surprise for a random shelf pick!
January 14, 2021
3.5 stars. This was an odd little book - entertaining and very readable but odd. The waitress from the title appears in the first couple of pages and then never again! Basically the narrator is the barkeeper at a Paris restaurant and he tells stories about the staff and the regulars at the restaurant - ordinary stories and extraordinary stories. His descriptions are very good so it was easy to picture the restaurant and the people in the stories, almost like he was painting them at the same time.
March 21, 2020
Part of the free library that Archipelago Books put together for the pandemic: https://archipelagobooks.org/2020/03/...
This is an example of what I like to think of as an Eleanor Rigby novel, and I found it, strangely, sad and soothing at the same time.
This is an example of what I like to think of as an Eleanor Rigby novel, and I found it, strangely, sad and soothing at the same time.
April 15, 2020
So typically French in style! (This is a good thing.) Great dialog and French atmosphere, and a couple twists along the way that are intriguing. And the end...typical French. While dark at times, it was a very satisfying one-day read.
September 4, 2025
I imagine this is what would happen if I never quit maman
September 10, 2020
A kind little book, with a decent heart.
October 26, 2023
a very simple story about an ordinary man, i’m not sure why i liked it so much but i did. the writing was brilliant and i related a lot to pierre
December 6, 2016
Pierre's is a quiet life. The head barman at a small cafe in the Parisian suburbs, he was once married (for a very short time) and now, a bit older, doesn't even date anymore. His life consists of working at the Le Cercle, where he has worked for over eight years, and occasionally having a drink at a neighboring cafe, and seeing a movie or having dinner with a friend.
The Waitress Was New focuses on Pierre's dealing with the changes at Le Cercle over the course of a week to ten day period, and how he deals with change within a quiet, meditative lifestyle. Having worked at Le Cercle for so long, and worked as a barman for so long, Pierre has learned more about human nature and motivations than most are aware. His is an anonymous profession, similar to the butler in Ishiguro'sThe Remains of the Day (minus the historical importance of the employers) His observations of the customers, and his understandings of who they are, propel the story, and make us wish we could actually be the apprentice to whom Pierre is teaching the trade to (were that possible):
"They come and go for the most part. Let the world turn around us, beyond our spotless bars, in the end every day will be wiped away to make room for the next."
"And then, not long after that, you could see tiny raindrops falling through the mist under the light by the newsstand, like little brushstrokes."
These observations, not only of people, but of atmosphere and environment, come from a life of watching, observing, anonymity.
The titular waitress of the book plays a very small role in the book, working at the bar for two days before she decides her commute is too far and that she cannot work under the circumstances to which the bar has fallen. Madeleine and Henri are the married proprietors of the establishment. Shortly after the book starts, Henri disappears, most likely to be with his mistress, and does not tell anyone. During this period, bills do not get paid, orders are not made for new supplies, food, vendors. The business is essentially left by Henri, who is the only one who calls the vendors and pays the bills, to flounder. He does not return. Pierre, as the longest employee, serves as a de facto manager and a calming presence. Amedee, the hot-tempered and talented chef, can always find another job, theorizes Pierre: he is young and talented.
Over the course of the next week, the restaurant closes for a few days, setting Pierre into an existential drift, the book becoming a meditation on loneliness. At 58, most of Pierre's friends are married or scattered. His closest acquaintances are fellow barmen, who serve him until after close and hold him in the same knowing esteem as we do those who share our profession. We see Pierre begin to wonder what his life has been, going through the memories of past girlfriends, of how long he has been in his apartment, of how his life of ritual and stability has hampered his ability to adapt, all the while told in Pierre's steadying voice, never feeling sorry for his circumstances, never rising above that of a kindly inquisitor. When he meets his closest friend less and less due to the others' romantic involvement, it's not an indictment of the friend, but a realization that habit and ritual, while creating comfort, can be the prime genesis of loneliness. Loneliness is the failure to adapt. when you are left with nothing but your past. Living is knowing loneliness won't defeat you.
"I wandered around for a while, and then I went into a cafe near Batignolles Park. I ordered a beer from a young guy in a white shirt... and we talked a little, when you're in the business you recognize each other. Maybe a barman still served some purpose, after all?... And that was that. I started back to toward Saint-Lazare to catch the last train home. But the closer I got the less I liked that idea. In the end, I decided to walk back to [my apartment]. Al my papers wer puled up in my table... waiting for me, and all my past."
The Waitress Was New focuses on Pierre's dealing with the changes at Le Cercle over the course of a week to ten day period, and how he deals with change within a quiet, meditative lifestyle. Having worked at Le Cercle for so long, and worked as a barman for so long, Pierre has learned more about human nature and motivations than most are aware. His is an anonymous profession, similar to the butler in Ishiguro'sThe Remains of the Day (minus the historical importance of the employers) His observations of the customers, and his understandings of who they are, propel the story, and make us wish we could actually be the apprentice to whom Pierre is teaching the trade to (were that possible):
"They come and go for the most part. Let the world turn around us, beyond our spotless bars, in the end every day will be wiped away to make room for the next."
"And then, not long after that, you could see tiny raindrops falling through the mist under the light by the newsstand, like little brushstrokes."
These observations, not only of people, but of atmosphere and environment, come from a life of watching, observing, anonymity.
The titular waitress of the book plays a very small role in the book, working at the bar for two days before she decides her commute is too far and that she cannot work under the circumstances to which the bar has fallen. Madeleine and Henri are the married proprietors of the establishment. Shortly after the book starts, Henri disappears, most likely to be with his mistress, and does not tell anyone. During this period, bills do not get paid, orders are not made for new supplies, food, vendors. The business is essentially left by Henri, who is the only one who calls the vendors and pays the bills, to flounder. He does not return. Pierre, as the longest employee, serves as a de facto manager and a calming presence. Amedee, the hot-tempered and talented chef, can always find another job, theorizes Pierre: he is young and talented.
Over the course of the next week, the restaurant closes for a few days, setting Pierre into an existential drift, the book becoming a meditation on loneliness. At 58, most of Pierre's friends are married or scattered. His closest acquaintances are fellow barmen, who serve him until after close and hold him in the same knowing esteem as we do those who share our profession. We see Pierre begin to wonder what his life has been, going through the memories of past girlfriends, of how long he has been in his apartment, of how his life of ritual and stability has hampered his ability to adapt, all the while told in Pierre's steadying voice, never feeling sorry for his circumstances, never rising above that of a kindly inquisitor. When he meets his closest friend less and less due to the others' romantic involvement, it's not an indictment of the friend, but a realization that habit and ritual, while creating comfort, can be the prime genesis of loneliness. Loneliness is the failure to adapt. when you are left with nothing but your past. Living is knowing loneliness won't defeat you.
"I wandered around for a while, and then I went into a cafe near Batignolles Park. I ordered a beer from a young guy in a white shirt... and we talked a little, when you're in the business you recognize each other. Maybe a barman still served some purpose, after all?... And that was that. I started back to toward Saint-Lazare to catch the last train home. But the closer I got the less I liked that idea. In the end, I decided to walk back to [my apartment]. Al my papers wer puled up in my table... waiting for me, and all my past."
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