The Café with No Name

by Robert Seethaler, Unknown Author

It is 1966, and Robert Simon has just fulfilled his dream by taking over a café on the corner of a bustling Vienna market. He recruits a barmaid, Mila, and soon the customers flock in. Factory workers, market traders, elderly ladies, a wrestler, a painter, an unemployed seamstress, each bring their stories and their plans for the future. As Robert listens and Mila refills their glasses, romances bloom, friendships are made and fortunes change. And change is coming to the city around them, to the little café, and to Robert’s dream.

Paperback

About the author

Robert Seethaler is an Austrian living in Berlin and is the author of four previous novels. A Whole Life is his first work to be translated into English and is already a German bestseller, selling over 100,000 copies. The book has been translated from its original German by Charlotte Collins.

Reviews

[Bukola Akinyemi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Set in 1966 in Vienna as the city recovers from the war, Robert Simon who is a handy man turned cafe owner creates a community and a space for the reader to get to know different members of the community over a decade.

As a certified people watcher and lover of character driven novels, this book gave me a good share of characters and their stories.

At the bookclub, we discussed our favourite characters and found out that they were not necessarily the main characters.

There was an unusual friendship in this book that reminded me of Sweet Bean Paste by Durian Sukegawa, translated from Japanese by Alison Watts.

Overall, this was a wholesome story with hope of rebuilding after the war, despite the war.

[Emma · Rating 5 out of 5]

A small, perfectly formed novella - as if Hemingway’s A Clean Well-Lighted Place somehow served as a diving board into a deeper exploration of quiet normalcy. Deftly written, and if you can grasp and appreciate the power of economy in the expression of human condition this is a tiny masterpiece.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really wanted to love this book. As I started reading I was looking forward to seeing how Robert’s life unfolded. But, in common with many lives, not an awful lot happened really! I get that the book is more of a series of observations of people and of the cafe itself, but I wasn’t invested in most of the other characters. I was invested Robert, his landlady and Mila. Book didn’t deliver for me, I wanted a story, delivered at pace.

[K · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Cafe With No Name is the story of a small cafe in Vienna after the Second World War, and how it assists the residents recover their lives after the horrors of that war. The characters are interesting, and the story doesn't have any major points to make--it simply tells of a small community in recovery.

[Liz Neville · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really like Robert Seethaler's writing. It's not like anything of huge drama ever really happens in his novels, but I like the 'slice of life' approach. Reading about normal people's lives. Was particularly nice to read this just before a visit to Vienna.

[Peter Brown · Rating 3 out of 5]

Many glimmers of sadness and hopes taking many different paths - a wistful read emphasizing that we’re all lost in the wood. These lives told incrementally make an interesting companion to Katja Oskamp’s ‘Marzhan, Mon amour’.

[Genevieve Helene · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some nice moments in this, but overall I found that I just didn't care about the characters at all. I was very much looking forward to reading it as I loved his first two books, but for me this one fell a little flat and I was pleased when I finished it.