The Café with No Name

Starred review from November 25, 2024
The beautiful latest from Seethaler (A Whole Life) revolves around the diverse patrons of a Viennese café. In summer 1966, war orphan Robert Simon, now 31 and tired of manual labor, decides to open a café. With encouragement from the local butcher and his elderly landlady, Robert leases a space. Soft-spoken and kindhearted, he finds his new role fulfilling, though as sole proprietor he’s overwhelmed, so he hires out-of-work seamstress Mila Szabica as a waitress. Together, they make the café into a neighborhood institution. Across a decade of accidents, illnesses, and romantic entanglements, the novel follows the fortunes of regulars like wrestling star Rene Wurm, who swiftly falls for Mila and marries her, as well as the tempestuous romance between cheese shop worker Heidi and painter Mischa. Meanwhile, Robert develops a bittersweet attraction to Jascha, a troubled young Yugoslavian woman, just as his landlady begins to descend into dementia. When the café eventually closes, readers will feel the loss as much as the characters do. Seethaler’s story bursts with empathy in its portrayal of a found family. This is a winner.

January 1, 2025
A neighborhood caf� sees everyday Viennese through personal tribulations and societal change. When proprietor Robert Simon opens his establishment in 1966, the Karmelitermarkt district is dirty and poor, its "basement windows still coated in the dust left behind by the war." His customers--laborers, market-traders, shift-workers--eat gherkins and potatoes and drink mugs of beer. Mila, a farm girl laid off from the textile mill, becomes Robert's first hire after she passes out from hunger on the curb. Other denizens include a kindly butcher whose wife is always pregnant, a down-on-his-luck professional wrestler, and an erratic Yugoslavian drifter who steals a piece of Robert's heart and empties his till. Around them, postwar Vienna is being remade. Booker nominee Seethaler (The Tobacconist, 2017) remains fascinated with the bigness of everyday lives and the constancy of change. Hard work--the constant sweeping, scrubbing, and cooking--is both oppressing and consoling. The caf� may not be much, but it's a still point. As the world turns faster, and "throws people off course . . . Isn't it a good thing if there's a place for them to hold onto?"

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Starred review from January 15, 2025
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, Ren�, 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.

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