The Waiter - Hardcover

Faldbakken, Matias

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0857525859 ISBN 13: 9780857525857

Publisher: Doubleday, 2018

Synopsis

'Delicious' New York Times

'As if The Remains of the Day had been written by Kingsley Amis . . . brilliantly exquisite . . . This book is a meal you won’t want to finish.' J. Ryan Stradal

'A sly amuse bouche of a novel . . . its atmosphere and observations are deliciously rich.' Mail on Sunday

Welcome to The Hills, Oslo’s most esteemed restaurant, an institution stewed in tradition and clinging to the faded grandeur of old Europe.

A neurotic waiter tends to the desires of his regular – and irregular – clientele. Aristocrats and artistes, wealthy widows and roguish entrepreneurs, he observes all their dramas with a wit as sharp as a filleting knife.

At table ten sits the impeccable Mr Graham, the most demanding of them all, impatiently awaiting a special guest. When at last she arrives – young, beautiful, mysterious – she will prove a challenging new flavour, throwing into disarray our waiter’s nerves, and the delicately balanced ingredients of the room.

Exquisitely observed and wickedly playful, The Waiter is a novel for lovers of food, wine, and of European sensibilities, but also for anyone who spends time in restaurants, on either side of the service.

About this title

Review

"As if The Remains of the Day had been written by Kingsley Amis, The Waiter is a brilliantly exquisite view into an uproariously vigilant life of service and protocol. In Faldbakken’s skilled hands, a mordant, lonely waiter in a declining restaurant becomes a raw, scrupulous force, powering one of the most purely entertaining novels I've read in years. This book is a meal you won’t want to finish." (J. Ryan Stradal)

"Faldbakken has a way with non-action. He builds a delicious tension between the paucity of events and the lavishness of the technique with which they are described." (New York Times)

"A sly amuse bouche of a novel . . . its atmosphere and observations are deliciously rich." (Mail on Sunday)

"Bringing to mind Mervyn Peake and Wes Anderson, with some of Nathanael West’s deadpan grotesque, this is a beguiling, quirky entertainment." (Kirkus)

"Good fun - but you sense a more earnest point, too, as [the waiter] snatches rare downtime to scroll nervily through the jumble of disaster footage and cat videos flooding into his phone, making the faded grandeur of his 19th-century establishment a symbol of broader, post-internet worries over what we've lost." (Daily Mail)

About the Author

Acclaimed Norwegian artist Matias Faldbakken (b. 1973), unanimously hailed as one of the freshest new voices to emerge in Norwegian literature in the past decade, is the author of the critically acclaimed, award-winning Scandinavian Misanthropy trilogy. The Waiter is his latest novel, and the first to be published in English.

About this edition

• Publisher: Doubleday
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 0857525859
• ISBN 13: 9780857525857
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 240