The Cafe With No Name by Robert Seethaler review – a cup of tea and a slice of life
On the face of it, Robert Seethaler’s new book might seem twee. The novel – an instant hit upon its German publication in 2023 – is set in Vienna in 1966. It tells of Robert Simon, who follows a long-held dream when he gives up doing odd jobs around the market to set up a cafe, which becomes a hub of community.
But Seethaler’s prose is unexpected, taking the novel, far from being an easy-sailing story of the simple joys of community-building, somewhere knottier. The author, whose previous works include the International Booker-shortlisted A Whole Life and the German bestseller The Tobacconist, was himself born in Vienna in 1966 – and so the story, set over a decade, tracks the modernising city of his childhood. The cafe sits on the corner of Karmelitermarkt in Leopoldstadt – the historic Jewish district after which Tom Stoppard named his 2020 play.
The regulars are depicted with humour and compassion in Katy Derbyshire’s translation
Into the neighbourhood comes Mila, recently let go from her role in a textiles factory – which had been advertised as “a safe job for life” – because, the deputy engineering manager Herr Steinwender, said, “the Chinese were on the advance […] and they were simply cheaper than Austrians”. When Mila faints outside the cafe one day, Simon aids her recovery with soda water and a couple of gherkins. She hasn’t waitressed before. But, she says to Simon, she is a hard worker: “See that tough skin on my fingers? You won’t get a kitchen knife through that.” She starts serving in the cafe.
The cafe’s regulars are depicted with humour and compassion in Katy Derbyshire’s translation. Rose Gebhartl comes every evening on the look-out for gentlemen: “She always sat straight as a candle, her back extended and her chin jutting forward in challenge.” Meanwhile the butcher across the road confides in Simon about his family problems and inspires in the cafe owner a tender realisation: “He’d known Johannes Berg for years and, although they’d never said it out loud and perhaps never even thought about it, anyone who knew them would have called them friends. He was only just realising that now, at that moment.”
Most fascinating are the host of other customers whose voices we hear in evocative chapters of continuous dialogue. In these sections the nameless characters reminisce about their youth – “But the men were so handsome, weren’t they? And they smelled so good. My husband used to smell like fresh bread in the beginning” – and look ahead to what they fear about the new, changing Vienna, where a subway is being built, supermarkets selling vacuum-packed meat are opening on every street, and Yugoslavian immigrants keep arriving.
“It seems to me as if all I do now is drip, drip, drip through life,” says one. “Oh, you said that 10 years ago, you didn’t want your armchair upholstered, it wasn’t worth it any more. Now the chair’s a wreck and you’re still fit as a fiddle,” is the spunky response. It’s a typically entertaining pair of lines in this moving, charming novel about to what extent we must change as the world around us hurtles into the unknown.
• The Cafe With No Name by Robert Seethaler, translated by Katy Derbyshire, is published by Canongate (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
