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Book Reviewed by:A vibrant tale of love, companionship, and renewal set against the transformations of 1960s Vienna.
Summer 1966. Robert Simon is in his early thirties and has a dream. Raised in a home for war orphans, Robert has nonetheless grown into a warm-hearted, hard-working, and determined man. When the former owners of the corner café in the Carmelite market square shutter the business, Robert sees that the chance to realize his dream has arrived.
The place, dark and dilapidated, is in a poor neighborhood of the Austrian capital, but for some time now a new wind has been blowing, and the air is filled with an inexplicable energy and a desire for renewal. In the newspapers with which fishmongers wrap the char and trout from the Danube, one can read about great things to come, a bright future beginning to rise from the quagmire of the past. Enlivened by these promises, Robert refurbishes the café and, rewarding him for his efforts and search of a congenial place to gather, talk, read, or just sit and be, customers arrive, bringing their stories of passions, friendships, abandonments, and bereavements. Some are in search of company, others long for love, or just a place where they can feel understood. As the city is transformed, Robert's café becomes at once a place of refuge and one from which to observe, mourn, and rejoice.
Combining the enchantment of warm prose with tender humor, Robert Seethaler has written a charming parable of human existence animated by unforgettable characters and a kaleidoscope of human stories.
Excerpt
The Café with No Name by Robert Seethaler
At four-thirty on a Monday morning, Robert Simon left his lodgings in war widow Martha Pohl's flat. It was the late summer of 1966 and Simon was thirty-one years old. He had breakfasted alone—two boiled eggs, bread and butter, and black coffee. The widow had still been asleep; he'd heard quiet snores from her room. He liked the sound, found it strangely touching, and sometimes he cast a glance through the crack of the door to where he pictured the old woman's nostrils flaring in the darkness.
Down on the street, the wind hit him. When it came from the south the breeze carried with it the market's stench, the smell of rubbish and rotting fruit, but today it came from the west and the air was fresh and cool. Simon passed the gray housing block for retired tram workers, Schneeweis & Sons' metal workshop and a row of shops, all of them still closed. He cut down Malzgasse to Leopoldsgasse and, crossing Schiffamtsgasse, reached the...
What are you reading this week? (04/10/2025)
I just started The Café with No Name by Robert Seethaler. Also, finishing up On Call by Dr. Fauci (what an amazing human) and Circling the Sun by Paula McLain.
-Gabi_J
Robert Seethaler's novel The Café with No Name, published by Europa in translation by Katy Derbyshire from the original German, is set in Vienna twenty-one years after the war has ended, though the specter of war still blows across a melancholy cityscape.
Seethaler is a thoughtful chronicler of the small world within a world, the simple, the humble, and the modest. The relationships between his characters provide pockets of warmth in an indifferent city, as lonely people find ways of coming together in Robert's café. But this is no postwar utopia; these characters are flawed and deeply human, with bursts of kindness and generosity but also flashes of insensitivity and casual cruelty. The reader cannot help but grow deeply attached to this humble café and all its denizens...continued
Full Review
(643 words)
(Reviewed by Danielle McClellan).
Anuradha Roy, author of All the Lives We Never Lived
Robert Seethaler has always created the epic from the ordinary…In The Café with No Name, he makes poetry out of the broken lives of the lost and disregarded who inhabit the margins of the great city and shows us how gold can be found in dust. Elizabeth Strout, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Olive Kitteridge and Lucy by the Sea
How I loved this book! Filled with truth after truth, poignantly rendered and given to us with tender open-handedness. Seethaler is in his very own league, capturing a place and time that is ultimately universal.The novel The Café with No Name is set in Vienna from 1966 to 1976. To fully immerse oneself in the atmosphere of the novel, it may be helpful to review a short history of Austria and its capital during and after the Second World War.
Austria was part of Nazi Germany from March 1938 until April 1945. When Hitler's troops entered Austria in 1938, in an event known as the Anschluss (or annexation, as Austria was now annexed into greater Germany), they received enthusiastic support from most of the population, and during the rest of the war almost one million Austrians would fight in Nazi Germany's armed forces. Other Austrians would participate in the Nazi administration. A minority of residents resisted the Nazi regime&...
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