In this book, translated from German by Katy Derbyshire, we follow thirty-two year old Robert Simon as he opens a cafe in his neighbourhood of Vienna. Over the years, we follow the lives of the café regulars.

The story is written a way to give the impression that you are sitting in the café alongside the characters, watching their lives unfold. There is no real plot to speak of, just short snippets that unfold either in the third person or as an overheard discussion between some of the elderly women that frequent the café. Robert Seethaler beautifully conveys the atmosphere of post-War Vienna, and those who have visited the city will enjoy his portrayal of some of the famous sights such as the Prater.

A recommended read for fans of Vienna and of books that focus on portrayal of everyday life.

Thank you to Netgalley and Europa Editions for providing me with a digital copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Delighted to include this title in the February edition of Novel Encounters, my column highlighting the month’s most anticipated fiction for the Books section of Zoomer, Canada’s national lifestyle and culture magazine. (see column and mini-review at link)

Set in Vienna beginning in the 1960s, Robert takes over a run-down cafe and turns it into a place of connection for the neighborhood. There is sadness and humor in this short, charming book.

In Vienna, as in many other cities in Europe, the Second World War did not truly end in 1945, but continued to sink its icy talons deep into a society still traumatized many years after its official close. So many lives were forever changed by its losses, casting a pall over an entire generation, the inevitable inheritors of wartime’s collateral damage.

The novel Café with No Name by Robert Seethaler, published by Europa in translation from the original German, is set in Vienna twenty-one years after the war has ended, though the specter of war still blows across a melancholy cityscape. The novel opens in late summer 1966 at a turning point of our protagonist’s life: Robert Simon realizes a long-cherished dream when he receives the keys to the small café that he will run for the next ten years. The café, which is never given a name, is located at the edge of the bustling Carmelite market in a modest neighborhood, and it will serve as a quiet witness to the local residents and market workers, themselves often nameless, as they pass through, sometimes seeking only a moment of refuge, sometimes leaving their mark in a more indelible way, and sometimes finding a place in which their lives and their stories can be safely shared. For what is a city but a collection of human stories?

Robert, thirty-two when he takes over the cafe, has little memory of his childhood before the war in which he lost both of his parents and was moved to a home for war orphans run by the Sisters of Mercy. Since leaving school at the age of fifteen, Robert has done a variety of manual labor jobs, early on “joining a squad of emaciated men” participating in the rebuilding of the shattered city by erecting walls, shoveling rubble and earth into bomb craters and hammering iron from the ruins of the destroyed train station, and later working for the various vendors at a small public market. Over the years, as he has watched his city slowly recover and begin to flourish once again, he has nurtured his own wildly improbable dream: to one day stand behind the bar of an establishment of his very own.

Seethaler is a thoughtful chronicler of the small world within a world, the simple, the humble, and the modest. The relationships between his characters give the larger city a warmth and a human face, as lonely people find ways of coming together in Robert’s café and their storytelling hallows moments of life within this microcosm, with its everyday kindnesses and disappointments, reflecting the larger common life of the city itself. We meet Robert’s war widow landlady; the market butcher and his growing family; the young country girl Mila who becomes an essential worker at the café and the wrestler that she loves; the painter with the roving gaze and the cheese shop owner who puts up with his infidelities. Slowly a full cast of characters emerge and the once nameless coalesce into a community. People fall in love, people die, there are accidents and fights, illness and births. The reader cannot help but grow deeply attached to this humble café and all the denizens within it.

Seethaler is at his best when he describes the minute details of life in the city. His language is precise and evocative. Here he is describing Robert’s fading early memories of life with his parents: “What remained was his memory of a heavy coat and a kitchen-scented apron and the blurred image of a staircase steeped in yellow light, a pair of spectacles with finely scratched lenses folded on the top step.” Throughout the novel, the hardships and unexpected sorrows of life are never far behind the characters, but there is also a sense of energy and life as the city changes and grows and memories of the long war finally begin to fade.

An edited version of this review will appear in the Feb 26, 2025 edition of BookBrowse. My thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for an ARC copy.

cafe with no name was an excellent read. I loved the writing and it was propulsive. Great character study. I would read more from this author.

In Vienna in 1966, Robert Simon, a young man whose parents died when he was just a child, decides that what his down-at-heel neighborhood needs is a café. He leases the long-closed bar near the street market where he’d been a jack-of-all-trades laborer, cleans it up and opens. It’s nothing fancy, but it doesn’t need to be. It’s there for the neighborhood people, the merchants, the shop and factory girls, people passing by, and Robert’s friend the butcher. A fired textile mill worker, Mila, comes to work alongside him, and 10 years go by.

Ten years of ordinary lives, with their hopes, heartbreaks, illnesses, and little bursts of happiness. Day after day, Robert works at the café, going home at night to the home of the war widow, Frau Pohl, from whom he rents a room. As she descends into dementia, Robert treats her with consideration and respect. Then the era ends with urban change and Robert losing the lease on the café. Despite how much of a fixture the café and Robert have been to the neighborhood, life goes on.

This is a quiet celebration of ordinary lives.

I received a copy of this novel from the publisher via NetGalley.

This is set in 1960s Vienna, and describes how a man called Simon opens and then runs a cafe (which he never gets round to naming). There is no overarching plot as such, rather he encounters different people and we hear their stories. Some are only in the narrative for a short time; others like the butcher and his very fertile wife, waitress Mila and her wrestler husband, and Simon's landlady (always referred to as 'the widow') run throughout the story.

The tone of the book is muted and I would say that it shows that bad things happen even to good people and not everyone can be saved, but it is best to just keep on making the best of things and showing kindness to others.

I, perhaps, am not this novel's target reader. It's one of those books where not much happens, but the characters and their lives play out over years centered around a cafe in Vienna. The writing is beautiful

I was happy I was able to read this novel as it's sweet, nostalgic, and the portrait of people and a city in a specific historical moments.
Great storytelling and style of writing. I want to read other story by this author
Highly recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher for this ARC, all opinions are mine

For some reason, I found it very fascinating—the cover, title, and the blurb. And I really liked the beginning. It was slow-paced but soothing. The writing is neat. When Mila arrived, I expected it to pick up the pace and get more interesting; however, as the story progressed, it didn't really seem to progress (if it makes sense). It seemed to be going nowhere, with monotonous monologue and uninteresting conversations. 
Sorry it didn't work for me, and I am really disappointed.

Loved this. Solid plot. Strong character development. Wonderfully atmospheric. Pretty compulsive read.

Cafés are a very important part of Viennese daily life, and I learnt that Unesco has even recognized Viennese coffee house culture as part of the inventory of intangible cultural heritage. It really deserved a novel (or more than one!).

I feel that the writer wanted us to be like people eavesdropping on someone’s conversation at the next table of a café. I loved the idea, but unfortunately I didn’t fall in love with the result. We get glimpses of different people and their stories over the course of the years they regularly come to the café from the early 1960s on, but I didn’t feel very engaged with any of them.

What I enjoyed though was the atmosphere of a city that at first is still reeling from the aftermaths of the war. The café is dirty and dark, in a poor neighborhood near a market with fishmongers and patronized by factory workers. Little by little, just as the café gets cleaned up and a fresh coat of paint, we feel that the city is full of new energy, there are construction sites and modernization. Some part of old Vienna disappear and people grow older and change.

Overall it was a pleasant, melancholy reading experience, not quite unforgettable, but it made me want to return to Vienna once more!

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley. I received a free copy of this book for review consideration.

I'd seen this author's name in book prize longlists, so I knew this might be a good book, and I was not disappointed. This story follows the birth, development and death of a cafe that provides a social space in an Austrian neighborhood after the close of WW2. The main character, Simon, has always wanted a cafe of his own, so when the local cafe is left abandoned after the war, he picks up the lease on it and reopens the cafe. Over the years is serves as a meeting space for all sorts of people and serves as the setting for all sorts of dramas. The book follows the various people whose lives connect through the cafe, which remains the common thread to the very end. This is a very satisfying and elegantly written short novel, and I enjoyed reading it.

Often I felt lost when reading The Cafe' with No Name. I wanted to like this novel. I've been to Vienna and loved it. I have a friend in Austria. I know she loves to read, I was thinking "buddy read". I feel like something might have been lost in translation. I felt that everything would come together in the end ... and I did like the last 10% of the book best.

3.5 stars, rounding up to 4 stars because of the ending. (Although I was quite sure for most of the book that this would be 3 stars, I'm a softy with my stars.)

What is the book about? A man who makes a Cafe a warm and inviting place in the community and the people who come and go and support his efforts.

Many thanks to NetGalley, Robert Seethaler (author) and Europa Editions for approving my request to read the advance read copy of The Cafe with No Name in exchange for an honest review. Publication date is Feb 25, 2025, approx 190 pages.

gorgeously introspective but very stoic in a way i'm not sure works, although it fits the feel of an old B/W movie this book is going for. 3.5 rounded up. tysm for the arc.

A pleasant read, but I didn't become as invested in the characters as I expected from other reviews. I wondered sometimes about the translator's choices -- there were some odd words sprinkled in, but perhaps that was a reflection of odd words used in the German. I also found it strange that the vanished, murdered Jews of Vienna were never once mentioned. (In 1938 there were over 200,000, in 1951 9000). One time only there is an offhand comment that half the people in Vienna are Nazis. But otherwise, the war that is sometimes mentioned as being in the recent past could have no connection with the Holocaust. Maybe this was an intentional comment on people's wish to forget an uncomfortable past? I just found it strange, as characters in the book would surely have known many Jews -- including café owners.

This book was a bit slow for me. It was still good and I was able to read through it, but it had lots of pills and parts that just didn’t get me excited to read on. I think the writing was decent, the characters were okay, but it was just ok not that great for me

Thank you to NetGalley, the author, and the publisher for this complimentary ARC in exchange for an honest review!!

Beginning in 1966 and spanning the next ten years, this story follows Robert Simon as he opens a cafe in post war Vienna. A character in the story as much as a setting, Vienna shifts and evolves as it modernizes. Against this backdrop, The Cafe With No Name provides a haven for those who the city threatens to leave behind.

While a quieter story with a slower pace than I initially expected, several of the characters stayed with me long after the book ended.

Thank you to NetGalley and to the publisher for an advanced copy of this book.

I come neither to praise this book or bury it. It's okay.
It's a nicely written story set in a down at heel part of Vienna. The fact that the author kept causing bad things to happen to all the central characters left me feeling bereft and sad. I imagine the story is realistic, but I look to stories for escape from how depressing life can be!