A novel of melancholy set in RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL
Novel set in 1960s VIENNA
18th December 2024
The Café With No Name by Robert Seethaler, novel set in1960s VIENNA.
TR: Katy Derbyshire
I read The Tobacconist (TR: Charlotte Collins), which was Waterstone’s Fiction Book of the Month, April 2017, and really enjoyed it. I was therefore very much looking forward to this novel.
The book opens in 1966 when Robert Simon takes over the running a café, located just off the busy market square. He is lodging with a widow and serendipitously recruits Adele as the barmaid for the establishment. Together they build up a going concern, which offers a lot of Viennese staples and it evolves into a convivial place for locals to congregate.
This is very much a story of quotidian interactions. People pass through the cafe bringing their everyday lives and their stories into the spotlight; they tuck into the food and drink and socialise. The narrative is at some levels an exercise in observation, redolent with the universality of interconnecting lives, with all the concomitant highs and lows. There is a good and poignant sense of time and place. Nevertheless, at some level it can be quite an emotionless account – there is the trauma of still birth and the response is simply “I am so sad” and the next chapter moves swiftly on to Robert’s hospital experience when his fingers were severed from one hand.
For me, there was an intrinsically interesting story of people and place, but some of the novel’s potential (and at times I did wonder where it was going), ultimately got dulled a bit by the translation, which, here and there followed the German so closely that the English felt stilted – offering turns of phrase that didn’t feel quite right. It needed a greater lightness of touch and creative interpretation to bring fire into the words. As it stands, the narrative has a slightly lumbering nature, which makes the reading experience rather lacklustre – and whether this is due to the original text or the translation (perhaps a combination of the two) is difficult to determine.
There is, however, a good sense of place as Robert negotiates his way in and around the city. And, of course, the book cover is tremendously eye-catching.
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