Robert Simon has rented an old café. Before it can become the place he imagines, there are walls to paint, floorboards to sand, and furniture to clean. He gets on with the work.
The name is less cooperative. He has considered it, but nothing feels right. For now, the café will have to open without one.
That is a pleasantly practical way into a title that could invite all sorts of symbolism. “No name” need not announce a profound mystery. A man is setting up a business, and one item on the list remains unfinished.
Robert Seethaler’s The Café with No Name, first published in German in 2023 and translated into English by Katy Derbyshire, begins with that kind of tangible ambition. Simon wants a place of his own. Other people will come into it with needs he has not anticipated. We can follow them through the door before deciding what the place represents.
Put the postcard away
The story begins in Vienna in 1966. Simon is thirty-one, earns his living doing odd jobs around the Karmelitermarkt, and lodges with a war widow. There is no distinguished career to explain, no famous identity waiting to be discovered beneath his ordinary appearance.
The German opening available through Vorablesen quickly gives the neighborhood physical substance. People work here. Things have to be carried, cleaned, and made ready for another day. Simon is already part of this activity before he imagines becoming a café proprietor.
Readers arriving with an idea of Vienna as an elegant conversation conducted over elaborate cakes may need to set it aside. This café belongs to a working neighborhood. Its appeal will not depend on a celebrated customer having once occupied a particular chair.
Nor does Simon need to meet a historical figure before his life becomes worth following. Wanting to run a small business is enough to bring change into it. The preparations introduce hope, expense, uncertainty, and a different relationship with people he already knows.
The work is important to that hope. A pleasant atmosphere can be imagined in an instant; a dirty floor cannot be made clean by the strength of the imagining. Seethaler’s opening lets the effort remain visible. The future establishment is still a room somebody must get ready.
Then the door has to open. People may come in, but they do not owe the proprietor satisfaction simply because he has tried hard. Keeping a business going involves other people’s judgments, habits, and willingness to return. That gives a modest enterprise plenty of room for a story.
The date also matters. This is not Vienna in the immediate aftermath of the ceasefire. More than twenty years have passed since the war ended. Its damage still shapes Simon’s life and the neighborhood, while new building and new expectations are changing the city. The novel chooses a small place within that change, rather than offering a comprehensive history of reconstruction.
Mila needs a job
Once the café begins to gather people, Simon can no longer be its only story.
Mila has lost her factory job. She comes looking for work and becomes his employee, though serving customers is new to her. Her initial difficulty is concrete: something she had expected to depend on no longer provides an income.
For Simon, hiring her is equally practical. There is work to be done. One person needs assistance; another needs wages. Their relationship can begin from those needs without being exhausted by them.
Writing in The Beijing News, critic Gong Zi draws attention to Mila’s lost expectation of secure work and the significance of the café for her. The observation gives warmth something firmer to stand on. Being offered a job cannot compensate for every disappointment, but it can change what tomorrow looks like.
Other people enter the café’s orbit, including the butcher, local workers, and the wrestler René. His connection with Mila becomes one of the novel’s relationship threads; its development is better left to the book.
Occupations help us recognize people quickly, but they are incomplete introductions. Someone may bring his working habits straight to the table or reveal a side that has little room elsewhere. We know how he spends part of his day before we know what to make of him.
This is one of the pleasures of a neighborhood novel. On a first appearance, a character may be little more than a name and a trade. When he returns, we remember an earlier remark. Expectations form. A complete biography is unnecessary for the reader to begin caring about the next visit.
Familiarity is not the same as harmony. A room that can accommodate different people will also accommodate their irritations. What is endearing at one moment may be exhausting at another, without anybody having undergone a dramatic change of personality.
Calling them all “goodhearted little people” in advance would make the experience thinner. It is more interesting to notice which people attract us, which make us uneasy, and when those responses shift. Simon need not supply our opinion of everyone he serves.
Company has limits
A café is almost a ready-made promise of comfort. We know the outline: strangers bring their disappointments inside, learn to understand one another, and leave better equipped for life.
There is genuine pleasure in company here, but relationships bring difficulties through the door as well. Drinking does not only relax people. Concern can coexist with misunderstanding. A busy room is no guarantee against loneliness.
That makes it worth resisting the impulse to turn Simon into a life coach disguised as a proprietor. He is running a business and living a life of his own. Caring about someone does not mean knowing what will help them, much less possessing the power to make their suffering stop.
In an interview with FOCUS, Seethaler says that status and reputation do not determine his interest in a person. He also discusses his working-class background and acknowledges having wanted to leave that environment.
The two observations belong together. Attention to an ordinary life does not require idealizing its conditions. A place can be worth writing about without being somewhere everyone should remain. Familiarity may include affection, impatience, and the desire to get away.
That is a useful freedom for the reader too. We can enjoy the café’s companionship without declaring older neighborhood life superior to everything that came after it. We can recognize the limits of warmth without pretending that a little company is worthless.
A café cannot hold the entirety of its customers’ lives. Fiction can nevertheless linger there long enough to give their apparently incidental encounters weight.
Comfort, or a familiar recipe?
The German opening offers an accessible route into the novel. Simon is walking, working, preparing the premises; pieces of his earlier life emerge alongside the person we are meeting now. We do not first have to memorize a family tree or learn a set of elaborate narrative rules.
The café itself provides an easily recognized center. People can leave and come back, and so can the reader. That steadiness is part of the attraction. It is also where a skeptical response begins.
In his review for Deutschlandfunk, Oliver Jungen acknowledges Seethaler’s storytelling skill while finding the mixture of nostalgia, emotion, and recognizable character types too expertly arranged. For Jungen, its fluency does not compensate for a lack of depth; the broader upheavals of the period also remain at a distance.
That is a substantial objection, not simply a refusal to enjoy something gentle. If you want a Vienna novel closely engaged with the political energies of the late 1960s, or a cast whose every return overturns your first impression, this may not be the book you are seeking.
Yet familiarity need not feel empty to every reader. Some will want to spend time with an episodic story because small encounters can accumulate into the texture of a lived year. It is possible to know that life is more complicated than a novel’s chosen room and still be interested in that room.
A useful expectation is neither a source of daily wisdom nor a definitive portrait of an era. Try the opening for its attention to work and the changing shape of an ordinary day. See whether you want to remain with the man who is making the place ready.
At the beginning, Simon has not found a name. We need not solve that for him by attaching a grand meaning to the café. Let the people arrive. They will give us more to go on.