The Café with No Name - by Robert Seethaler (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A NUMBER ONE INTERNATIONAL BEST-SELLER

A NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS' CHOICE

A tale of love, companionship, and renewal set against the transformations of 1960s Vienna.

"How I loved this book! Filled with truth after truth, poignantly rendered and given to us with tender open-handedness."--Elizabeth Strout, author of Olive Kitteridge

Robert Simon is in his early thirties in 1966, when the owners of the corner bar in the Carmelite market square of Vienna shutter the business. With the help of an old family friend, he buys the property. It is dark and dilapidated, located in a neglected neighborhood of the broken Austrian capital. But for a while now, an unexpected spirit of renewal has been felt in the city. One hears talk of a bright future beginning to rise from the quagmire of the past. Robert refurbishes the café and soon customers begin to arrive in search of a congenial place to gather, talk, read, come to terms with the monumental changes afoot, or just sit and be. They bring with them stories of passionate love, friendships, abandonments, and bereavements. Some are in search of company, others long for love. As the city is transformed, Robert's café becomes at once a place of refuge and one from which to observe, mourn, and rejoice.

Combining the enchantment of warm prose with tender humanity and gentle humor, Robert Seethaler has written a charming, atmospheric tale about the extraordinary richness of ordinary lives.

★ "A gem of a novel, whimsical and bittersweet but never sentimental, with indelible characters and a powerful sense of place."--Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Review Quotes

"A gallery of vibrant characters presented with an appealing blend of understated honesty and unsentimental warmth."--Alida Becker, The New York Times Book Review

"Mr. Seethaler's quietly beguiling eighth novel, The Café With No Name, is his most uplifting to date... The sense of community that emerges in the nameless coffee house recalls the connections forged between quirky, lonely people in Haruki Murakami's stories and in Satoshi Yagisawa's novel, Days at the Morisaki Bookshop. At one point, Robert attempts to articulate what the cafe means to his patrons: 'The world's turning faster and faster, and now and then it throws people off course whose lives are heavy enough as it is. Isn't it a good thing if there's a place for them to hold onto?' Mr. Seethaler's sensitive, compassionate novel provides such a toehold."--Heller McAlpin, Wall Street Journal

★ "A gem of a novel, whimsical and bittersweet but never sentimental, with indelible characters and a powerful sense of place."--Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

★ "Beautiful... Seethaler's story bursts with empathy in its portrayal of a found family. This is a winner."--Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Evocative and aching, Seethaler's tale is as true as life itself."--Toronto Star

"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... Robert Seethaler's story is warm, sympathetic and real. He makes these people's lives matter."--Winnipeg Free Press

"A humble café in post-World War II Vienna serves as backdrop for all the large and small dramas of everyday life in this subtly scintillating novel... While Seethaler's characters face significant difficulties, the story never feels grim, but rather steadfast and even hopeful. Katy Derbyshire translates Seethaler's prose from the German with calm delivery, charming descriptions, and understated humor. This lovely novel sweetly and simply emphasizes built family, resilience, and rebirth."--Julia Kastner, Shelf Awareness

"Seethaler's subtly understated voice remains warmly welcome in a literary culture that often displays its intentions too obviously. Many will love this calming, gentle and unsentimental story. Certainly, Seethaler remains admirably true to his creative vision. A poet of the small, the random and the event without consequence, his is a world we can all enjoy."--Alice Jolly, The Guardian

"Seethaler's literary preoccupations [can be placed] alongside writers such as Claire Keegan, John Berger or John Williams... Modest ambitions, when precisely executed, make lasting impressions...and his latest fable-like miniature invites quiet wonder into the ordinary."--Matthew Janney, Financial Times

"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 prose has the stillness of a Vermeer... you see beyond the moment. In a world of action movies and social media there's little time for quiet contemplation. Seethaler reminds us we're part of a whole."--Lee Langley, The Spectator

"Robert Seethaler's latest charmer is a small book... [that] offers an intimate portrait of a time and place, a working-class neighborhood in 1960s Vienna... A reminder of the strength and importance of human connections."--Marissa Moss, New York Journal of Books

"While the novel stands up for the dignity of the human amid the casual violence of progress, it contains something more existential at its heart. It is haunted yet curiously timeless, a study of the battle against loneliness and despair, and of the traumas of war that persist through the generations."--Karen Leeder, Times Literary Supplement

"How I loved this book! Filled with truth after truth, poignantly rendered and given to us with tender open-handedness. Seethaler is in his very own league, capturing a place and time that is ultimately universal."--Elizabeth Strout, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Olive Kitteridge and Lucy by the Sea

"Robert Seethaler has always created the epic from the ordinary...In The Café with No Name, he makes poetry out of the broken lives of the lost and disregarded who inhabit the margins of the great city and shows us how gold can be found in dust."--Anuradha Roy, author of All the Lives We Never Lived

"Infused with bright, beautiful glimmers of human connection, The Café with No Name is a novel as cozy and welcoming as the meeting-place established by its protagonist...Readers will turn the last page feeling an indelible part of the community Seethaler so lovingly and joyously brings to life."--Shannon Bowring, author of The Road to Dalton

"A masterful novel about work and love, connection and despair, how we carry one another, how we transcend the days and the indignities, and how no life is mundane...On page after page, Robert Seethaler's The Café with No Name strikes with the force of life."--Nick Arvin, author of Mad Boy

"Set in the 1960s and 1970s in a city where World War II still reverberates, Robert Seethaler's tender novel meditates on the passage of time and bonds that last."--Foreword Reviews

"A neighborhood café sees everyday Viennese through personal tribulations and societal change... Around them, postwar Vienna is being remade. Booker nominee Seethaler remains fascinated with the bigness of everyday lives and the constancy of change."--Booklist

"Melancholy and gently understated... This is a sweet book, but it never cloys."--Vox

"Seethaler sets the stories in true-to-life details... Recommended for readers seeking a literary exploration of post-war common people in Vienna as they rebuild their lives and homeland."--G.J. Berger, Historical Novels Society

"Heartwarming... Intersecting tales span over a decade in a work that might call to mind a Mitteleuropa take on Cheers."--Nicholas DeRenzo, AARP

"The Café with No Name is a moving, charming novel about to what extent we must change as the world around us hurtles into the unknown."--Ellen Peirson-Hagger, The Observer

"Chronicling the everyday dramas of the café's patrons over its decade-long existence, the novel is more an ode to a vanished world than a portrait of any single individual... Seethaler's Vienna is evoked with a wistful and tender folksiness. His characters face heartbreak, loneliness, and the winds of change, but they can always return to the unnamed café."--Eamon McGrath, Asymptote Journal

"200 pages of pure reading pleasure."--Florian Balke, FAS

"Magnificent! Highly and unequivocally recommended."--Florence Noiville, Le Monde

"There is so much at stake in this novel, almost everything."--Frankfurter Rundschau

"Seethaler is a god of ordinary people's feelings. His characters and settings come alive without a single wasted word and with no undue heaviness at all; his style is straightforward and pure."--Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

"Seethaler moves from life's dramas to the love of Others and engages his readers to the point where they will feel as if they too are regulars at this Viennese café."--Il Piccolo

"When someone discovers that books are an important part of your life, the inevitable question follows: have you read something beautiful that you'd recommend? It would be all too easy to get entangled in the thicket of taste, attitude, books already read, personal predilections, etc. But to this question, there is an answer: the novels of Robert Seethaler. All of them, one after the other. And if you don't know where to start, you're in luck: start with his most recent book, The Café with No Name, a novel written by a pure talent, a storyteller beloved in German-speaking countries and translated into more than 40 languages."--Il Quotidiano

"Seethaler illuminates the lives of ordinary people, people who are making it up as they go along. His characters re vivid and relatable, and Seethaler renders them with a few simple strokes, as if he bumps into them every day at Simon's café."--Tagesspiegel

"Seethaler brings the lost souls of the city of Vienna to life."--ZDF Mittagsmagazin

"One doesn't need to read Robert Seethaler to understand that failure is often life's central experience. But you enjoy reading about it in Seethaler more than with any other writer, because he is so carefully, loving, and doesn't take detours or make excuses."--Süddeutsche Zeitung

"Seethaler writes with so much empathy. He has mastered the art of telling big stories about small lives."--dpa

"Seethaler has a special talent for portraying lives through their pure essence. This is a novel about survival, love, strength and death."--NDR Kultur

"Tells the story of life as a constant process of growth and decay."--ORF Ex Libris