«The Waiter» by Matthias Faldbakken is a plotless novel about a neurotic waiter who blurs the lines between literature and life. This is a description of two days in the life of an ordinary waiter: he watches colleagues and guests, but none of the declared intrigues is ever resolved.
Matias Faldbakken (born 1973 in Hobro, Denmark) is a Norwegian artist and writer. Faldbakken studied at the National Academy of Fine Arts in Bergen and the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main. He is the son of the author Knut Faldbakken and brother of film director Stefan Faldbakken.
The novel by the Norwegian Matthias Faldbakken is one of those books that are very difficult to approach with analysis and explanations. And the first obstacle to any convincing interpretation is the complete, almost conspicuous, lack of plot in "The Waiter". And not only a built, structured, traditional plot - that would be half the trouble. No: in Faldbakken's book there is no story at all, from which, at the very least, one could push off.
The protagonist is a neurotic waiter who has worked for many years in the old and respectable restaurant Hills. For almost three hundred pages, he mixes up orders (such a responsible job is not easy for a person with a fine mental organization), chats with colleagues and serves customers, simultaneously spying on fragments of their lives. One patron of the restaurant is trying to attract another as an expert in painting (he needs him to appreciate some dubious painting), a third patron acts as an intermediary in this delicate matter, and they are all clearly passionate about a beautiful and mysterious stranger, flipping lightly from one table to another .
However, none of the planned collisions is resolved within the framework of the novel: all the plots and denouements take place outside the restaurant, which means, outside the main character's field of vision. Moreover, his own life in our eyes also has no beginning, no climax, no end: all we see is his two working days, filled with events either unusual or quite ordinary - we cannot compare with how. We do not know how the hero became friends with Edgar (this is the name of his best friend, who, along with his nine-year-old daughter Anna, comes to the Hills every day for lunch), what relationship connects him with the chef bar (a smart and obviously very kind woman), why he, freely quoting the classics of world philosophy, works as a waiter, and why he is so afraid of the huge basement under the restaurant. All we have to be content with is the fragments reflected in the fragments, or, if you like, a piece of film accidentally cut off on both sides.
One might get the impression that "The Waiter" is something like Carl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle, only with an adjustment for the lack of burning autobiography: the same amorphous and fluid plotlessness, the same arbitrarily chosen time frames, the same constant confusion - so not to say non-distinction - external and internal, thoughts and actions. However, this comparison will be inaccurate: unlike Knausgaard, who deliberately writes across all literary laws, Faldbakken plays on a completely traditional field. Except for the bewildering lack of history, "The Waiter" successfully masquerades as a perfectly normal novel in what the author himself calls a “continental” style – at first it can even be mistaken for an ironic and charming rethinking of the British or French classics of the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. In other words, if Knausgaard creates the illusion of extreme lifelikeness by literally breaking the narrative canon on the knee, Faldbakken achieves the same goal in a different way - he crosses literature with life, forcing the first to play by the rules of the second.
We all exist in a space of exciting beginnings, promising episodes and impressive endings, which, however, almost never belong to the same story. At the micro level, life is indeed extremely similar to literature, but with a slightly broader focus, the similarity is lost - in fact, this is the idea that the author of "The Waiter" postulates. Oversaturated with details, Faldbakken's deceptively meaningful text constantly hints at the possibility of the plot roundness we are used to and each time deceives the reader's expectations. All the guns hung on the walls will not just not shoot - on closer inspection they will turn out to be not guns at all, but shadows, spots on the wallpaper, optical illusions.
However, what otherwise would have caused quite justified and understandable reader anger, in the case of Faldbakken puzzles, but does not outrage. The trick that he demonstrates to us looks so skillful that it makes us want to watch it again in the hope of catching the magician by the hand and understanding how he manages to blur the line between reality and fiction so deftly and imperceptibly, redefining, in fact, outlines of both. In short, while it is perhaps a bit of an exaggeration to call "The Waiter" an immersive reading in the traditional sense, it is one of the most extraordinary reading experiences imaginable and certainly a new word in the exciting and increasingly global process of rethinking the narrative principle. in literature.
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