The Café with No Name, by Robert Seethaler
Reviewed by Geoffrey Dutton
Translator: Katy Derbyshire3
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publisher: Europa Editions
Published: February 25, 2025
Pages: 192
Language: English
Hardback
EAN/UPC 9798889660644
Robert Simon was an intrepid handyman in 1966 Vienna who did odd jobs around the stalls of the Karmelitermarkt, fixing doors, awnings and plumbing, unloading crates of vegetables, and whatever else the shopkeepers needed doing. His father had trudged off to war and never returned. Then his mother died of blood poisoning, leaving him a five-year-old war orphan.
Despite these disadvantages and having abandoned school at an early age, Robert was able-bodied and intelligent, and dreamed of having his own business someday. The opportunity arose when he decided to re-open a defunct café across from the farmers market.
Robert persuaded the landlord, Kostja Vavrosky, who lived upstairs, to lease him the café, and quickly started to work cleaning out the dust and cobwebs, finishing the floor, painting the walls and lacquering the tables and chairs. Not just the café, but all of Vienna was being rehabilitated and modernized with more than a fresh coat of paint. Change and optimism were in the dust-laden air, and Robert figured a nice little café would suit the mood of the times.
But what to call it? After discussing possible names with his friend Johannes Berg, the butcher, he decided not to bother. “Maybe it doesn’t matter after all,” Berg told him. “I mean, the Danube existed long before anyone called it the Danube. So your café can just have no name, and that’s fine.”
This slim volume by Austrian writer Robert Seethaler, admirably translated by Katy Derbyshire, describes the daily lives, loves, miseries, pecadillos, and even some deaths of the patrons of Robert’s establishment and brings the cityscape to life in colorful detail. Notice how many senses he invokes in this excerpt, two in the last sentence alone:
When he crossed the North Bridge on his way home later, the sun hung low above the Kahlenberg. The concrete beneath his feet was trembling with the rush-hour traffic and the sunlight created flashes and flickers in the windows of the cars zooming past. On the other side, buildings were already casting long blue shadows. A wind whipped up, carrying the clammy air from the flood plain. p. 66
In a later passage, Seethaler evokes the coming of rain.
Simon extended an arm and felt raindrops bursting on the palm of his hand. The cool are was pleasant after the recent days’ heat; the rain would wash the dust out if the ivy and if he set about it later with a scrubbing brush and a pail of soapy water, perhaps even the dirt encrusted on the kerbstone might come off. A delivery van sailed past like a ship, leaving waves on the road in its wake.
Notice the variety of verbs: extended, felt, was, wash, set about, come off, sailed, leaving. Action words are just one way Seethaler animates his prose. Another way he brings scenes to life are the descriptions of little goings-on in the characters’ surroundings, such as:
A piano chord chimed briefly from a window on the second floor. In response, a childish voice began singing scales: one after another, up and down, rising to ever more daring notes, almost inaudibly high. And then back to the beginning.
Each of Robert Simon’s patrons has a story to tell — too many to recount here. Besides Robert, we get to know Mila, an unemployed seamstress who becomes his waitress, the above-mentioned butcher Johannes, perhaps Robert’s best friend. Also Rene, a has-been wrestler who fancies Mila and marries her. Despite some fierce altercations, their affections do not wane. Then there is Robert’s long-term landlady, known only as the War Widow until the very last chapter. She gives him a winning recipe for hot winter punch, and he returns the favor with many courtesies that continue to her final days in a nursing home. Several characters die or disappear, which Robert tends to takes in stride — easy come, easy go.
Not that he is one to take things casually. He throws a few people out of his café and gets into occasional arguments. And despite being orphaned and bullied in his youth, he’s maintained a cheerful equanimity that draws people in. Even losing several fingers in a boiler accident doesn’t seem to get him down for long.
Every few chapters comes a soliloquy by an unnamed character. One by someone who probably isn’t Robert on page 39 ends with:
I remember my father used to say, don’t you look back, you’ve got your whole life ahead of you. Nowadays there’s muchmore past than future, though isn’t there? At least the sun’s shining, though, that’s better than nothing. Yes, better than nothing. Is he still looking over? No he’s gone now.
These passages are often enigmatic, poetic, wistful, but sometimes bitter, their mood and narrator subject to change. They amplify the element of time passing within a tale that plays out over ten years. Sic transit gloria mundi.
This is the point in a book review normally reserved for reservations, but you will find none unless you were expecting villains, a heinous crime investigation, suspense, or mayhem. You might find the novel’s plot weak and lacking an unexpected, dramatic denouement. You would be right, but that’s not the point. What you get is Seethaler’s sensorial mastery of everyday detail and his sympathetic characterizations. If you are okay with that and his various digessions, I doubt you will find anything in The Café with no Name not to like.
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