Those who find travelling in summer too stressful because of crowded airports, high temperatures and exorbitant prices in tourist resorts often resort to reading travel books with nostalgic narratives of travel experiences.
Paris, with its boulevards, museums and manicured parks is described as the City of Light. Still, like every other big European city, Paris has a dark heart hidden behind sodden cardboard boxes and litter-strewn pavements where underpaid and underfed workers, illegal immigrants and other marginalised minorities struggle to survive.
Sadly, human exploitation seems an accepted norm as the profit margin-obsessed business model has little respect for people’s dignity.
One of the best travel books published this summer is Edward Chisholm’s A Waiter in Paris. Chisholm is an English author who graduated from the London School of Oriental and African Studies. Having struggled unsuccessfully to find the job of his dreams in the UK, he went to France with his French girlfriend with little money, hoping to establish himself as a writer. Dumped by his girlfriend soon after arrival, he settled for a less glamorous career objective: being a waiter in a Paris restaurant.
A Waiter in Paris is a quick-flowing narrative of Chisholm’s eight-month experience as a waiter in a French restaurant. It describes in vivid detail the cruel, feral existence of many exploited persons experiencing the consequences of the anarchy and hopelessness of a city with a dark heart.
Travel books come in all shapes and styles. My favourite travel author is Bill Bryson, an American-British author specialising in travel books with an inimitable style of wit and humour that I have not experienced from any other author.
But A Waiter in Paris belongs to a completely different genre of travel books. It contains little humour but focuses on the socio-economic realities that underpin the daily lives of millions of people working in the underbelly of large European cities. One of the first realities this book exposes is that many students who follow university courses that are not in demand in today’s economy end up underemployed in dead-end jobs.
At best, these jobs offer survival wages without any career prospects. With a degree in Oriental and African Studies, Chisholm struggled to be accepted as a waiter in a Paris restaurant with a wage of just over €1,000 a month before taxes for 14-hour shifts.
Students may need to follow their heads rather than their hearts when planning their university studies
Chisholm comments: “Waiting work is hard, unrelenting and mindless.” The sole thing he can congratulate himself on is that he “had enough grit to stick it out”. This is certainly not the stuff that most students’ dreams should be made of. To avoid such a soul-wrecking experience, students may need to follow their heads rather than their hearts when planning their university studies.
Those who enjoy fine dining, especially when they travel to glamorous European cities like Paris, should avoid reading this book. This is one of the few cases where one would do well to follow the maxim that “when ignorance is bliss, it is foolish to be wise”.
Chisholm gives clinical details of what happens in some Paris restaurants and, one assumes, in many other restaurants in large European cities. He describes how soiled napkins and disgusting towels are used to wipe plates and glasses away from the sight of restaurant diners. Waiters all have filthy fingernails, worn-out shoes and frightful body odour. There is no basin in the staff toilet, nor any moment to wash hands: “The cooking will sort out the germs.”
Those working in large organisations may complain about how stress and internal politics affect their quality of life. Still, this fades into insignificance when one understands what those who work in precarious conditions have to deal with daily.
A waiter can be sacked on the spot “for the smallest of reasons”. Those who, like Chisholm are desperate to survive soon learn to bite their tongues when encountering the sort of people who go to restaurants and “suddenly they are little dictators. Do this, do that, I don’t like this, take this away”.
Chisholm goes further in his cold exposure of the sad realities that many accept as normal. He comments that it is not uncommon for posher Parisians to request they be served “by someone who is not black”.
Chisholm is now an established, successful writer. His work has appeared in The New York Times, the Guardian and the Financial Times Magazine.
A Waiter in Paris is recommended reading for those interested in discovering the dark hearts of European cities.