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THE CAFÉ WITH NO NAME by Robert Seethaler Kirkus Star

THE CAFÉ WITH NO NAME

by Robert Seethaler ; translated by Katy Derbyshire

Pub Date: Feb. 25th, 2025
ISBN: 9798889660644
Publisher: Europa Editions

This is the spirited story of a working-class Viennese cafe and its odd-duck denizens.

Robert Simon, an orphan who endured a hardscrabble youth, is now 31 in the year 1966. He makes a living doing odd jobs in Vienna’s old Karmelitermarkt and rents a furnished room from a war widow whose snoring he finds “strangely touching.” Simon does have some ambition, and when the decrepit old market cafe is put up for rent, he signs a lease and makes it his own. Soon, the place is humming, filled with local patrons—among others, there are yarn-factory girls; Simon’s pal Johannes, the local butcher; the former bill collector Harald, who plays with his glass eye; and Heide the cheesemonger, who feuds with her philandering younger husband, Mischa. When the robust country girl Mila, an out-of-work seamstress, turns up, Simon is persuaded to let her help run the cafe. Mila soon becomes involved with another patron, René, a hulking sometime wrestler. Simon, shy and kind-hearted, takes great pleasure in the cafe’s success. The book meanders pleasantly, though there is some real drama: Simon is severely injured when a furnace beneath the cafe explodes. Some time later, he finds himself falling for an odd Yugoslav woman named Jascha. And during the farewell party for the cafe, a decade after its opening, a nearby bridge collapses. Somehow, the life of the cafe—with its many comic and melancholic moments—seems to mirror an actual life. An earlier novel by this Vienna-born author, A Whole Life (2016), was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. Here, Seethaler shows a great gift for describing how things work as well as the beauty of the natural world. While the premise of lost souls drifting together in a scruffy cafe may not be wildly original, his funny/sad characters are finely drawn and remarkably vivid. Vienna itself is a player here: The Prater amusement park with its famous Reisenrad Ferris wheel, the pastry shop Demel’s, St. Stephen’s Cathedral, and even the Danube all figure in the proceedings.

A gem of a novel, whimsical and bittersweet but never sentimental, with indelible characters and a powerful sense of place.