Vignettes capture poignant cast of Viennese café

Winnipeg Free Press

26-04-2025

The Café with No Name is a slender novel about the everyday lives of the kinds of simple people who are usually overlooked, scorned or forgotten, and not just in fiction. Set in a nondescript café in a rundown section of Vienna during the city's reconstruction period (1966-76), Robert Seethaler's story is warm, sympathetic and real. He makes these people's lives matter.
Like Cheers, the renowned NBC-TV sitcom of the '80s, The Café with No Name is about the 'found family' that meets there. But it's more situation dramedy than a gag-oriented story that goes for big laughs and put-downs. It can be amusing, but mostly it focuses on the poignant micro-dramas of ordinary lives that most of us can easily relate to.
Its main character, Robert Simon, is a thirty-something handyman who takes over an abandoned café, a dream he's had since he was an orphan. For the most part, he's a hard-working man, accepting and contented with his lot in life. Simon (as he's called by the author throughout the novel) lives uneventfully in a single room in a house with a reclusive war widow.
The Cafe With No Name
His closest friend is a jolly butcher from a stall in the nearby marketplace who gets Simon to hire a waitress, Mila, a small-town girl who's been unexpectedly let go by a textile factory closed by competition from China. Other regulars at the café include Blaha, a man with a glass eye he regularly removes; Rene, a small-time professional wrestler; Mischa, a struggling artist who lives with Heide, an older woman who owns a cheese shop and is fed up with his constant cheating; and Rose, a lonely woman past her prime and looking for a man, any man.
No outsiders impinge on these people's lives — no authorities, no politicians, no middle- or upper-class interlopers. It's a closed circle. So the characters aren't vehicles for social commentary nor political satire; they simply exist to show how lives can intertwine in sometimes surprising and satisfying ways.
Befitting such an approach, the novel is divided into 39 short chapters, most of which are three to five pages long. It proceeds like a series of brief linked short stories or vignettes.
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The vignettes begin and develop in often unexpected ways. Near the book's end, for instance, a chapter begins with a response to an unspoken statement: ''I think it's a terrific idea,' the butcher said, stabbing his knife into the chopping block.' The rest of the chapter is a conversation about the butcher's wife being pregnant again and how it's recharged his love for his wife. This prompts Simon to think of women in his life: his own mother, the widow he boards with and the strange woman he loved briefly and thankfully lost. The 'terrific idea' — a party — is returned to at the end of the chapter in a marvelous display of Seethaler's easy narrative skill.
What sustains this chapter, and indeed the entire novel, is Seethaler's gift for convincing dialogue. His characters talk as if he's somewhere close at hand, listening intently and carefully transcribing what they say. In fact, six chapters are just dialogue, amusing exchanges between unattributed speakers that run together in one long paragraph. It's like we the readers are eavesdropping on actual lives.
In a world of oversized action heroes, amped-up plots and raging social media, Robert Seethaler's highly-regarded novels (including 2017's A Whole Life, which was a finalist for the Booker Prize) are warm retreats into truer personal interconnections.
The Café with No Name will greatly appeal to anyone looking for a realistic account of everyday human relations.
Gene Walz is a Winnipeg writer and editor.