Hope springs eternal: The Café with No Name, by Robert Seethaler, reviewed

Call it a mosaic. Here it all is – the pathos of a botched first date, a birth, a death, a feud, a stumble into love. The Café With No Name deals with the small dramas of everyday life.  The setting is Vienna – not the elegant city of Schönbrunn but the Karmelitermarkt, one of the poorest districts, debris from Allied bombs still filling the basements in 1966.

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Robert Simon has worked in the market for seven years, shifting crates of swedes, restacking firewood, cleaning the floor at the fishmonger. He enjoys his work, but he’s 31 and restless. He finds himself casting a speculative eye at the café on the corner, shabby and abandoned, ivy climbing up the wall. His landlady, a war widow, encourages him: ‘You always need a bit more hope than worries. Anything else would be pointless, wouldn’t it?’ He decides to take a chance.

The café opens and customers trickle in for coffee, cold drinks and bread and dripping. When winter bites, there’s hot punch and a lunchtime special: still bread and dripping but with added paprika. Soon Simon needs more help, and recruits Mila, a plump country girl from the yarn factory, who is faced with redundancy.

Robert Seethaler is drawn to supporting characters in his novels. The real star of The Tobacconist is the boy who hands Sigmund Freud his daily cigar. A Whole Life features an irretrievably modest protagonist, and The Field introduces us to an old man in a cemetery listening to the voices of the dead. This time we meet the living: Heide, from the cheese shop, who has a tempestuous affair with a penniless Russian artist; René, a summertime wrestler, ‘in winter a ticket-seller for bumper-car rides at the Prater’; girls from the factory; market traders.