DISCOVERIES
A Perfect Waiter
A Novel
Alain Claude Sulzer, translated from the German by John Brownjohn
Bloomsbury: 224 pp., $19.95
ERNESTE is the perfect waiter. An Alsatian, he left home at 16 to work at a Swiss hotel called the Grand. Now, in middle age, his life impeccably ordered, he works at the Restaurant am Berg, an antique world reminiscent of that in Kazuo Ishiguro’s “Remains of the Day”: “Monsieur Erneste belonged to a dying breed and he knew it, but he had no idea whether the people he waited on with due courtoisie knew it too.” Thirty-five years earlier, he’d fallen in love with Jakob, a young waiter at the Grand. Jakob broke his heart by falling in love with a writer named Klinger and following him to America. Erneste has not heard from him in years, and then one day a letter comes from Jakob, destitute in New York, begging him to find Klinger and persuade him to send Jakob money. Like a character out of Camus or Kafka, Erneste does not appeal to us by his warmth or humanity; he resists our pity. It’s the sheer simplicity of his one love -- and the steely purity of his life -- that fascinates: more metal than flesh, incorporeal, perfect.
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AK47
The Story of a Gun
Michael Hodges
MacAdam/Cage: 226 pp., $24
“IT is the AK47’s very simplicity that has powered its success,” writes Michael Hodges in this remarkable, thorough account of the assault rifle that is the icon of insurgents the world over. “With only eight moving parts, it is both cheap to manufacture and easy to use.” He begins his story with a visit to the dacha of Mikhail Kalashnikov, the gun’s inventor. “I’m proud of my invention,” he tells Hodges, “but I’m sad that terrorists use it. I would have preferred to invent a machine that . . . would help farmers with their work.”
Hodges’ history covers the gun’s development by the Soviets; its use by guerrillas and revolutionaries in such places as Chechnya, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq and Africa; and its role as a terrorist weapon. He visits all those places and talks with soldiers and victims; most terrifying are the sections on child soldiers in Africa. The AK-47 (“the people’s gun”), ironically, has also become the weapon of choice for American thugs.
In 2004, Vladimir Putin sent George W. Bush a crystal bottle of vodka shaped like an AK-47. After you’ve read Hodges’ tales of children and other innocent people mowed down by the weapon, it will seem a strange gift.
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Farm Sanctuary
Changing Hearts and Minds About Animals and Food
Gene Baur
Touchstone: 304 pp., $25
IN 1986, Gene Baur co-founded Farm Sanctuary, a group opposed to factory farming and dedicated to cruelty-free living and providing refuge to weak and sickly animals abused or rejected by slaughterhouses. The group has two farms; one in upstate New York and one north of Sacramento. Each has more than a dozen barns and hundreds of acres of pasture.
Baur grew up in the Hollywood Hills and was inspired by Frances Moore Lappe (author of “Diet for a Small Planet”), Abbie Hoffman and the Amish. Farm Sanctuary is now a preeminent animal- and food-advocacy group. Baur describes the growth of the animal-advocacy movement and its oversight role in both organic and conventional farming and includes delightful stories of some of the animals the group has rescued: Hope the pig, Marmalade the rooster and Maya the cow, to name a few. Readers will find their resilience inspiring. This is a habit-changing book.
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