What seemingly nobody knows: Erneste engages himself in a love affair with another waiter, Jakob, but what feels like true, affectionate and tender love to Erneste, is nothing more than just another fling, just another love affair to Jakob. He is polite and attentive, but remains withdrawn and never puts his personal affairs above his professional obligations.

'A Perfect Waiter' deals with a protagonist called Erneste who works as a waiter in a Swiss hotel and has obtained a reputation as being a man who quietly possesses all the qualities expected of a waiter - of a perfect waiter. It has been almost one and a half years since I read this tiny little book, but it has not managed to elude my regular thoughts, and for such a plain, seemingly unimposing novel without any impressive sequences of action, that should probably say more than enough. I found myself identifying with him so much that I had that terrible, wonderful reaction we sometimes get when we're really in the pages. He chose to be invisible and he pays a high price for it. What does all this have to do with the book? This book is about an invisible man. I did nothing to draw attention to myself. I forced myself to speak the way my father spoke. To deal with the situation, I did what countless gay boys have done. I was an effeminate boy and suddenly I was a target for scorn and violence. That all changed when my peers became sophisticated enough to realize that I was different from them. I had a big personality and a bigger mouth. I remember going from middle school to high school I had been popular and seen up to that point in life, but suddenly all my attributes had become liabilities. I myself have been invisible at times, sometimes by choice, at other times due to circumstance. We look at them and then just as quickly look away, they're invisible. There are also those people that we don't want to see - the disabled, the homeless, sometimes just the different. We might give them a polite nod or a kind word or a generous tip, but we don't really see them. We don't see people serving us in restaurants or hotels because they are not meant to be seen. They are the people who we see with our eyes but don't make any connection with, for whatever reason. There are invisible people in the world, of course. Though the word wasn't used until near the end of the book, the idea of invisibility is hard to escape or ignore from the very first page. The word 'invisible' kept popping into my head while reading this.

A Perfect Waiter by Alain Claude Sulzer