When the story you’re writing is very complicated, heavily plotted, allegorical, teeming with characters or just plain dense, you have a little margin for error. You don’t necessarily have to knock every sentence into the bleachers.

 

Sometimes a writer will simply write sloppy prose but get by on strong ideas. Example: Philip K. Dick. I’m busy trying to get my head around the fact that this character who lives in a dystopian future is himself reading about a dystopian future which bears an uncanny resemblance to the dystopian future in which I happen to live. I don’t have time to wonder if “effervescent” is really the best adjective to describe a sunset.

 

Sometimes a writer will make a conscious choice to rein in his or her prose in order to allow the reader to more easily follow what’s going on in the book at large. Example: Tolstoy. I spend all my time remembering that Marya, Maria, and Masha are all the same person, daughter of one prince, sister of another prince, in love with a third prince, friends with this princess and enemy of that one. I’m not really all that concerned with whether or not, “The sun came up,” ought to have been, “The sun rose over the battlefield like an adjective noun simile.” It doesn’t matter.

 

But when the story you’re writing is very simple that margin of error disappears. The choice of the right word becomes extremely important, because those word choices add up to your tone which quickly adds up to your aesthetic, which is itself almost the entire story. When you’ve got one or two characters dealing with one situation, you’ve got to nail it. Every word. Every sentence. Every scene. Example: Grace Paley. Another example: Roberto Bolaño’s novellas.

 

Dominque Fabre’s The Waitress Was New is another good example. 117 pages. One major character and four or five minor ones. And it works because Fabre makes excellent choices from the top down. Choosing the right character, Pierre, a 56 year-old café bartender. Choosing the right story, Pierre’s boss disappears one day in the grip of an ongoing midlife crisis, leaving his wife and his business to fend for themselves. Choosing first person, a narrative voice that has often been overused or used to poor effect, but which in this case is absolutely the right choice because it allows Fabre to offer the reader an awful lot in an unobtrusive, natural way. Choosing to use these elements to produce a book as apparently modest yet casually profound as its own protagonist. All of these choices, each of them right in this particular case, are then carried through. The result is book that took a few hours to read, which has been echoing in my head ever since.

 

Pierre does not tend bar in some dive, nor in some fancy restaurant, but in a modest café, basically a bistro, on the edge of Paris. He works the day shift. He has his regulars. They talk at him, not to him. He says very little. His bosses mostly talk at him as well. His co-workers are pleasantly collegial if not friendly. Then he gets off and wanders around, goes home and watches the news and then slowly reads Primo Levi’s holocaust memoir, If This is a Man (Abacus Books). He dreams about work then wakes up and goes to work.

 

Throughout the book, Pierre talks either to himself or to the reader, sometimes it’s hard to tell which, about whatever crosses his mind, most of which relates to his work. And every so often, in the middle of a paragraph about some quotidian banality, he’ll come out with a line like, “I aged a lot, watching over that empty café,” that is just sad, plain sad. Or he’ll make some poignant observation, usually touching on his own futility as a human being. Or some odd, revealing confession, such as the fact that he puts Nivea on his face every night because he worries about looking old. This stuff adds up. I was very quiet while I was reading this book, without really knowing why.

 

It bears mentioning that Fabre’s depiction of life as an employee in such a place is one of the best I have ever read. I speak from about ten years in the trenches as a line cook, waiter, and barista. The Waitress Was New brought back to me how unutterably tired and depressed I was during that tenth year, pondering the unanswerable questions, such as, “What the hell am I doing here, anyway?” that eventually led me to walk away. It is nice that there is a book which speaks as well as this one does for all my friends who had nowhere to walk away to, who are probably still there, being talked at by people who are neither friends nor strangers.

 

N.B. Unfortunately my French is grim joke, and anyway I have not seen the French text of this book, so my ability to speak intelligently about the quality of Jordan Stump’s translation is exactly nil. That said, I feel confident enough in the reputation of the book’s publisher, Archipelago, to feel safe in assuming that the translation is of quality. Dominque Fabre seems to like it, since he will be reading from this book while on tour in the United States, beginning this Monday, February 25th, at the Old Can Factory in Brooklyn, with dates in Chicago and points west later in the week.

If Mundus begins his journey with a vade mecum, Dominique Fabre’s short novel, The Waitress was New was mine—the little French book in my jacket pocket that went everywhere with me, particularly to doctor’s appointments for borderline afflictions. Again, we have a wholly engaging ordinary life where nothing much happens, with everything in fact going on. It’s recounted to us in all modesty by a Parisian barman, Pierre (“I’m only a barman”),(43) who parcels out his opinions and increasing amounts of personal information, regularly accented with self-deprecating tag lines, such as “If you asked me…if you don’t mind my saying…I’m just throwing this out.” (28, 45, 28)
Pierrot, as he is called, is both participant and observer of the small world Le Cercle, a café located in the Hauts-de-Seine area where he’s been working most of his life. A sweetly comic book, savored with tristesse, lightly renders feeling and profundity in the manner only the French can.

Pierre daily patiently applies a steady hand to yet another of the café’s perpetual crises involving his absent boss and long suffering wife. Feeling old and worn at 56 and weighing the prospects of retirement, while assaying his physical fallibilities, “I’m a little hard of hearing in my left ear,” Pierre confides, “even though I was never much of a masturbator.”(20) Like Mundus, Pierre is also a reader and finds himself caught up with Primo Levi’s If This is a Man; he tells us, “He was some guy, that Monsieur Primo Levi. There’s somebody I would have loved to have as a customer.”(73)
Seeming so clearly on the surface a man without qualities, Pierrot provides a narrative voice riveting and unforgettable. Although he would more likely conclude, “so that’s how it is.” (95)

Reamy Jansen’s prose and poetry have appeared in a variety of literary magazines; he’s received several nominations for the Pushcart Prize for both his poetry and prose. He is, along with his collaborator, the poet Daniel M. Nester, the co-editor of “The Out of Bounds Essay,” a new and continuing bi-monthly feature of this magazine.

 “Parisian Tale in the Style of ‘Diner'”

Picture a rundown, rain-soaked Parisian café called Le Cercle. It’s the kind of place people “come in to get out of the weather, they have a drink, and they go on their way.” The glasses are thickly cut and the ashtrays display the names of French aperitifs. The owner smokes a cigarillo in the morning and worries about his health.

“That week he was scowling more or less full time,” says Pierre, the 54-year-old veteran bar-tender who narrates this world to life. Step into it and you pretty much know this restaurant is about to unravel.

It’s not a dramatic unraveling, but a sad, slow leave-taking that forms the wounded heart of Dominique Fabre’s beguiling little novel, which is elegantly translated by Jordan Stump.

If Barry Levinson’s “Diner” could be said to have a French literary equivalent, this might be it. Here is the world of a French café turned inside out by a hugely empathic bar-tender who doesn’t miss a thing which goes on around him. Fabre gives Pierre a fabulously realized voice, gravened by loss and softened by routine into something lived in and real-seeming.

The mixture of Pierre’s hugely likable voice and the acute melancholy of his observations lends “The Waitress Was New” the peculiar mystery and vividness of lived experience. Pierre directs our eyes, camera-like, around the room, and points out the young man who comes in and reads Primo Levi. He talks about listening to a thrice-married wealthy customer, who goes on a bender from time to time. “I listen while he throws out sentences that don’t always know where they’re going.” Other nights the man undresses and tries to throw himself into the Seine.

Quietly, however, Fabre makes it clear that Pierre is in fact as desperate as his customers, even the owner, whose affair with a waitress is partly the reason why this ship is going down. When it does, Pierre, who has been at this job since he was 19, floats free, adrift in Paris, with no human barrier to the intense loneliness that clings to him like a wet coat. At least when there were lovers ruining their lives, young couples camped out at back tables, the pinched contours of his life remained obscured. He was part of something, simply by being there so long people took him for granted.

This could be a maudlin story, or a self-pitying one, but Fabre has such a light touch, so many keen, but easily worn observations to make about urban life, that “The Waitress Was New” never becomes that kind of book. Instead, it is in fact perhaps the perfect Valentine’ Day read, a book for the other half of the world that spends this made-up holiday alone.

“They’re you’re equals,” Pierre says, of the people who pass and pass, and pass through his life. “They’ll leave you a tip on their way out, but whatever they’ve left hanging in their lives hasn’t budged a bit.”

The same goes for the narrator of this mesmerizing, true little book.

 

The Waitress Was New is the first of French author Dominique Fabre’s novels to be translated into English. The novel is narrated by Pierre, a 56-year-old bartender who has been tending bar his entire adult life, more or less, and has spent the last eight years working at Le Cercle, a typical French café situated in the Parisian suburb of Asnières.

 

I’ve been fifty-six for three months now. My last birthday didn’t really get to me, but my fifty-fourth almost threw me into the Seine, if you’ll pardon the expression. I took a half-day off to see a prostrate specialist and get my free checkup from Social Security, they couldn’t find anything wrong. That filled me with joy for two days, just long enough to pick up a nasty hangover. I thought about my dream again, then pushed it away with a shrug as I served a beer-and-Pincon to a guy from the MMA insurance office on Maurice-Bokanovksi, he has a pointy beard and a black suit. Sabrina calls him Landru. And after that I just kept right on going. Fortunately the new girl knew her job, because without the boss around it was hard work manning the bar. Amédée was in his unusual good mood, and Madeleine had to get after him a couple of times, nothing terribly serious, but the pass-through’s too small, the dining room was noisy that day. The boss’s wife wasn’t letting it get to her, she stayed behind the cash register the whole time, looking like she was thinking of something else, probably wondering where he could have got to, and keeping an eye on things like she always did, between chats with the regulars. Once or twice I caught her giving the ceiling a blank stare, the boss had it repainted two summers before, during the August closing. Since I hadn’t gone away on vacation that year—or the year before or the year after, for that matter—he’d asked me to keep tabs on the work, and I did. She had the dreamy look of a boss and wife whose marriage was heading steadily downhill if you asked me.

 

The novel follows Pierre’s life over the course of a few days, and opens with the opening of Le Cercle. The normal waitress, Sabrina, is out with the flu, and shortly after introducing the new waitress, the boss, Henri, sneaks off. Pierre and Henri’s wife Isabelle, who works the register, assume Henri has gone to spend time with his mistress, the ‘sick’ waitress Sabrina.

 

Fabre seems more interested in investigating the inner life of Pierre—albeit in the limited way that Pierre, who spends his life listening rather than talking, is able to describe his thoughts—and painting a small portrait of a group of working class people than in creating a complex plot, so there isn’t a lot of action in this slim volume. Pierre makes the briefest of enquiries when Henri doesn’t show up for a few days, and then comforts Isabelle. He has couscous with his long-time friend and fellow bartender, Roger, and keeps the café open in Henri’s absence for a few days. He has a fleeting interest in a couple of different women, but seems resigned to being alone at his age. He contemplates retiring, but discovers that he’s a few years away from qualifying for a full pension.

 

As I said, there aren’t a lot of fireworks, but as a portrait of a Pierre and his ‘everyman’ life, the novel is a success. The reserved, melancholy, and resigned tone that Fabre strikes is maintained beautifully throughout the book, and he has given Pierre just enough wit to lighten things up from time to time. And, in keeping with the ‘slice of life’ feel of the book, the slight twist at the end doesn’t bring any closure, rather it opens further possibilities which remain unexplored. This is a quiet book, but one that promises to stay with you long after you’ve finished reading it.

 

Overall, The Waitress Was New is well worth the long afternoon it takes to read. Hopefully, Archipelago plans to publish more of his novels in the future.

The Waitress Was New is narrated by Pierre, a fifty-six-year old barman at a French café, Le Cercle. He has his role and his routine, but over the course of this short novella he keeps getting pushed out of these. It begins with the new waitress, standing in for the regular waitress, Sabrina, who is out sick. That only makes for a slight adjustment, but there’s more to come.
The café is run by a younger married couple, but Henri, the boss, is getting restless again, and he disappears when he should be taking care of business. His wife is all in a tizzy when she’s not sure what he’s up to, and Pierre tries his best to keep things running more or less smoothly.

 

Pierre is past his mid-life crisis — which hit him hard when he turned fifty-four (that “almost threw me into the Seine, if you’ll pardon the expression”) — and he seems more resigned-philosophical, admitting some regrets (especially about not really settling down) and wondering how his life has come to this. He’s not completely resigned: there’s a customer who always has his head stuck in a book, and though Pierre is no great reader he sometimes goes out and buys whatever he sees the fellow is reading, a volume of Queneau, a Primo Levi, for example. And he takes some pride in his role at the café, which seems to suit him. Events, however, force him to take more things than he’s used to into his hands, life-changing turmoil that he’s not sure he’s up to any more at this stage in his life.

 

The Waitress Was New is a fairly simple story — little more than a character-study. But Pierre is a sympathetic character, slowly revealed by Fabre (and the circumstances), and it makes for an appealing little novella.

The title and first sentence of his absorbing, ultimately profound novella are identical and herald the end of 56-year-old, very single Pierre’s 20-plus years as a barman in the suburbs of Paris. Of course, he doesn’t know that the end is nigh, though he knows something is afoot. The boss has been noticeably interested in the new waitress’ predecessor, and the boss’ wife has been preoccupied. The boss ducks out before lunch, which is more than usually hectic, and his wife decamps as soon as possible after the rush. Next day, the boss isn’t back, and his wife comes to work only just before things get desperate. A few days proceed in the same manner, and then the boss’ wife leaves, too, closing the café down, temporarily. An unforeseen yet surprising development brings story, café, and Pierre’s job to an end. Fabre tells the whole story from Pierre’s deliberately unassuming, socially inconsequential perspective. By the last page, Pierre has become not Everyman, but all-too-common man.

 

After decades of listening to his patrons’ life stories, a bartender shares his own in the first of French author Fabre’s novels to be published in the United States.

 

Pierre has been at Le Cercle, a café in the Parisian suburb of Asnières, for eight years. Before that, the 56-year-old tended bar at several other places, fell in love a few times, married and divorced once. He now lives alone and sometimes wonders if he will ever have another woman. The conscientious worker has little time to dwell on private matters, however, because Sabrina, Le Cercle’s waitress, is out sick with the flu. Henri, the café’s owner, has hired a temporary waitress. When she arrives, Pierre is relieved to see that she is good at her job. Despite Sabrina’s absence, the day will be just like other days, Pierre thinks. Then Pierre’s boss slips out the back door and things get complicated. Henri’s wife Isabelle believes he is having an affair with Sabrina; he has strayed before. But when Pierre borrows Isabelle’s Audi to help resolve the crisis, he finds that Sabrina really is sick, and Henri is not there. With this low-key material, Fabre eloquently conveys the wisdom of a man forever in the background, observing the lives of others. When Isabella closes the café, Pierre is left wondering how much longer he will need to keep working before he can claim his pension.

 

Simply and elegantly captures the dignity of a day’s work, the humanity of friendship and the loneliness of aging.

For his U.S. debut, Fabre offers a poignantly funny, slender slice of a French waiter’s life. Pierre, 56 and divorced, has worked at the suburban Parisian cafe Le Cercle for so long that he’s become a fixture. He’s a good listener, too, particularly to the boss’s wife, heartbroken over her husband’s seeming affair with the young head waitress, Sabrina. As a long shift unrolls, the boss and Sabrina are absent from the busy cafe, leaving Senegalese cook Amédée fuming and Pierre and the title’s fill-in waitress scrambling. The next day brings big changes, and loyal, orderly Pierre must suddenly measure out his mortality by the pay stubs he has hoarded over his working life. In Fabre’s patient, deliberative layering, the details of Pierre’s quotidian life assume an affecting solidity and significance.

Shape Notes: On “Fossil Sky” by David Hinton

Reading David Hinton’s poem “Fossil Sky” is no simple matter. This “lyrical map,” as the author calls it, spirals its way around a 54 square-inch sheet of paper. There’s no up or down, no left or right or beginning or end—following the poet’s train of thought entails twisting the paper, or yourself, to follow the sinuous lines of print like tracks across a wilderness of white space.

The first time I read “Fossil Sky,” I spread it out on a bed. The second time, I lay it on the grass, which seems more appropriate to the poem’s imagery of field and sky. But my cat decides to use the poster-sheet as a blind from which to attack me, and besides, the grass is getting dewy. Draping “Fossil Sky” across a patio table, I wonder if I can ever be sure I’ve read the whole thing. Without the usual orientation points, it’s hard to know when you’re “done” with a poem. And maybe that’s Hinton’s point.

“In 1988, I remember my wife and I looking at this big star map we had spread out on the floor,” Hinton says in the living room of his East Calais home. “And it just struck me: I could write a poem like this. But it took 14 years to figure out how to do it.” He ended up designing “Fossil Sky” using the graphics program FreeHand 4 on his 10-year-old computer. What is the poem a map of, exactly? Hinton suggests that it’s the human mind. “Poetry, for me, at its deepest level is about consciousness,” he says. “Consciousness is spatial, and inside it is the flow of language, which is linear” —like the lines on the page.

If Hinton’s description of consciousness recalls the Zen Buddhist notion of “empty mind mirroring the world,” it’s no coincidence—he earns his bread translating classical Chinese poetry and philosophy. In 1997 he received a Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets for his renderings of Li Po and two other poets.

Although “Fossil Sky,” put out by Archipelago Books this April, is the first verse of his own he’s published, Hinton says that poetry originally led him to translation and not the other way around. “Chinese philosophy always made a lot of sense to me,” he explains, citing the impact of Chinese literature on 20th-century American poets like Ezra Pound and Kenneth Rexroth. Graduate study in Chinese at Cornell led Hinton to a two-year stay in Taiwan. Later he found himself translating poets he admired, like Tu Fu, whose power he thought vanished in dry scholarly renderings.

Still, when it came time to return to his own verse, Hinton tried to avoid creating “Chinese-sounding poems.” As he tells it, “I wanted to do something that came out of that world-view that seemed accurate and deep to me, but that was also innovative and added something to poetry.”

“Fossil Sky” describes a landscape: the south of France, where Hinton spent a grant year in 1998-’99 with his wife, poet Jody Gladding, and their daughter. But it’s a portrait we receive in fragments—a tatter of sky here, of water there, with images of bright summer fields blurring into ones of frost and “the wordless ink-dark clarities snow brings to lakewater.”

Hinton compares this to the way people “slowly build up ideas over time. I used to tend to write on walks. So you go out for a walk, and maybe something happens, you see a bird or something and maybe you have this idea, and you go out for another walk and add something to it. It’s this slow accretion.”

While most lyric poems present the finished, polished product of a “slow accretion” of thoughts, Hinton says he aimed in “Fossil Sky” to recreate “this whole more immediate life-experience, so you can sort of wander around in it“—again, like a map. He stresses that there’s no “right” way to read the poem. “If somebody comes to it with some intelligence and assuming that they’re empowered, whatever happens is the right thing.”

Wandering around in “Fossil Sky” is a bit like navigating a maze that has no center and no exit. Starting from one of the poem’s six “entry points,” you may come to a fork where it’s up to you how to continue the thought. You may meet a crossword-puzzle-style intersection of two sentences, or a sentence that simply frays out into white space, like thoughts as you doze. While the poem definitely isn’t “meaningless”—as one Internet reviewer puts it—its meanings can be hard to pin down.

Take, for instance, a pathway where we read what sounds a lot like a thesis statement: “The particular is meaningless… against the fierce and ancient abstractions driving human history.”

“Aha!” we may think. “Hinton’s talking about us puny humans being dwarfed by the universal.” The stream of conscious-ness that follows seems to support this idea, juxtaposing the image of a “long-legged skitterish cricket”—a puny creature if there ever was one —with glimpses of the timeless, terrifying night sky. “[L]ooking out from earth, we gaze back through starlit time to its very beginnings,” writes Hinton.

“But the long view is a mirror,” we read as we follow the spiral—words that later repeat themselves. And the cricket keeps popping up, too, its importunate summer chirp interrupting the Deep Thoughts about origins and eternity. Mirroring the world, the poem mirrors itself in these repeated phrases and motifs. And it suggests that the “particular”—the puny cricket, or the “I” who some-times narrates the poem—isn’t so meaningless after all. Maybe the “long view” always leads us back to our own backyard.

“Fossil Sky” has presented Hinton with some unique challenges—for instance, how do you give a public reading of a poem with no beginning or end? For appearances at various New England colleges and universities, he and Gladding worked out a solution: Give the floor to the audience. Five people come up one by one and read pieces of “Fossil Sky,” starting wherever they want. If they accidentally cover the same ground, “it still sounds different,” says Hinton.

Hinton isn’t done experimenting with funny-shaped lit. For his next project, he’s staying “outside of the book” with a translation of the medieval female Chinese poet Su Hwi, which takes the form of a grid.

“It’s fun to have this different relationship to language,” Hinton says of “Fossil Sky.“ “You can get outside of it and move it around.”

November, 2004:

David Hinton deals in Chinese poetry and philosophy. (His works include translations of Tao Te Ching and Mencius.) His recent publication of original poetry, Fossil Sky, fits agreeably in his body of work. I must say, though, it is a risky sort of collection. No, not a collection. That is not quite right. If Fossil Sky is a collection, it is a collection of words and their sites (in space, in the mind). It is not a collection of poems, per se. Fossil Sky is risky because it is not a book. Hinton has re-defined the boundaries of poetry in print which is something very exciting, indeed. Fossil Sky folds out like a map. And I not speaking in simile; this is literal. It can be spread across a tabletop, a floor, your lap in the car. I am stunned by the thing as an object. Is this where readers of contemporary poetry should be looking to set their fingers to pulse? Hypertext. Illustrated works. Installation. Wild maps? Poetry’s space has become less and less permanently defined. David Hinton’s work is a symptom of the wonderful madness of form gripping poets all around. This is exciting news for readers. Your regular dose of heady poetry now comes packaged in such delightful ways, you nearly feel guilty.

Fossil Sky is generously handsome. Lovely to handle. It looks like a poetry roadmap… and Hinton is not so subtly egging his reader on. Go, go: choose your route, sketch a path. The text itself loops around and around, breaks apart into islands of one or two words (“hydrogen,” “ash,” “in and”), and generally meanders (“early crickets pitched too high for aging ears their song all sky now”). Sometimes, the lines of text even cross over one another so that a controlled bit of chaos breaks out in spots on the map. This kind of reading is a game; it requires as much concentration as you choose. I found I would get up from the floor and the map and when I returned I had no idea where I’d left off. There is an unimposing circle outlining the piece, so Hinton nudges your direction through the thing, but the words face every which way and the lines never stay steady for long. Be prepared to get up and crawl across the Twister-mat you find yourself reading poetry atop of. “Perhaps I should have stayed home: a roof a family a fire But there are other forms of shelter: Boundless sky cocoon light whisper snow[.]” The real genius of Hinton’s form is the endless metaphorical application. This is a journey. Poetry is a journey. Words are places. Places are in words. Sounds are sights. Sounds are sites. The mind rambles. Travel can happen in the mind. With words in places. With images that move. Direction is relative. And so on. I’m sure I’m making it sound sophomoric here, but I don’t mean to. This is great brain candy.

Though I do believe that Fossil Sky is risky (because of its “formal daring,” as the PR info states), I also believe that Hinton has conveniently eluded traditional critique. I find it hard to even quote the verse here, let alone begin to construct a notion of the whole. That is, I cannot see a whole outside of the map. I know that this project is the culmination of “a year of walks.” I know that Hinton references his daughter. And time. And he likes living in the words of the places of the world. But something about this form resists the kind of reading I am accustomed to. This, of course, begs the question: Do poets hide in avant-garde forms? I certainly hope not, as I so enjoy the novelty of it all.