Rick Simonson

Sweet Fabre-cation
March 25, 2008

Rather behind we have been in here, on several fronts. Getting through February and March - the buying season as it wanes - is always seems to be the hardest haul of the year ... the mounds of catalogs worked through.

Meanwhile, many visitors of note have passed through Seattle, a good number paying visits to our bookselling piece of the planet.

Few of late have come further, or under such 'slender' circumstances as French novelist Dominque Fabre did in coming from Paris to read from  the only work of his translated and published in this country, The Waitress Was New. First published in 2005 as La service etait nouvelle, The Waitress Was New was recently released here in a beautiful, petite edition (117 pages) from Archipelago Books,  translated by the University of Nebraska's Jordan Stump. It's one of nine novels the 47-year-old Fabre has written. Based on this book and meeting him - a most charming man - we can only hope there are many more translated.

Small and unassuming, in every way, The Waitress Was New may be but it packs a wallop not carried by books many times its size.  Its narrator is Pierre, a bartender in his early 50s, working in a small neighborhood cafe in suburban Paris.. He knows his trade well - the comings and goings of clientele, the workings of the cafe, what needs doing and who's doing it, the larger ways and tendencies of his work. With great economy of language, he captures those he works with, the man and woman he works for, the paces and changing moods of a cafe as it goes through a day.

Within the few pages of this book, fateful events concerning the cafe transpire. Even more, Pierre's ruminations on work also become rumination on life, most tellingly his own. Drawn into helping others - being empathicaly present for, and talking to the wife of the cafe owner, worried about her husband's disappearance (assuming he is off with a certain women), Pierre looks into his own life.

There's a recollecting of marriage, of relationships, of choices foregone. There's also an awareness - at his age - that choices of work, of love he may have always assumed would be out there to be made - the door of possibilities is starting to close. There's an aching, almost heartbreaking poignance in his recognition and acceptance of it. Reading The Waitress Was New I sometimes thought of the memorable butler narrator of Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day. That character never grasped where he was, until it really was all but over. Fabre's Pierre sees where he is with eyes he is just starting to open to this knowledge - of the limits of the time to come.

The audience for the reading was fairly modest in size, but moved and enthused by reading's end. Even more, Fabre's coming - and the beautiful edition - a bright-red matte cover, French flaps, a perfect Modigliani portrait - got several  working here to read it. Now it's on the staff picks shelf, handscribbled notes attesting to its wonders and pleasures - Pierre's story is selling ...

Posted by Rick Simonson on March 25, 2008 | Comments (0)