The Café with No Name

"a reminder of the strength and importance of human connections."

Robert Seethaler's latest charmer is a small book in the sense that there is no dramatic plot. Instead, the pages offer an intimate portrait of a time and place, a working-class neighborhood in 1960s Vienna. The cafe of the title is run by a war orphan, Robert Simon. Growing up without a family, Simon creates his own in the world of the cafe. The cast of characters, from the butcher to the war widow, are each lovingly evoked. The author casts the same tender eye on them that Simon does, each chapter dedicated to a different small life story within the larger whole.

Simon is the center of it all, the anchor to the whirlwind of lives around him He finds his own sense of self in the cafe, a sense of purpose, amid all the hard work:

"There were moments of calm too, when the conversations fizzled out and everyone leaned back like they were exhaling together. Simon stood behind the bar and held glasses up to the light to check their shine, and when he turned around to put a glass on the shelf he saw himself in the mirror with his apron, the pencil behind his ear and an expression of quiet incredulity on his face."

We follow the people who give the cafe its character as a place of community. Like Simon, we're onlookers while also being part of the cozy world between the cafe walls.

"Simon thought about his customers. It was strange how little information he had about them and yet how well he knew them."

Time passes; things change and stay the same. Simon is older now and can appreciate what the cafe has become.

"Despite occasionally recurring doubts and adversities, the future had lain open and friendly before him. He had seen it in the cafe, which gradually developed its own personality and even, in Mila's opinion, something like a soul."

When the cafe eventually closes, there's a sense of Vienna itself changing. Small places are replaced by big developments. The world moves at a faster rate than the slow moseying of cafe time. What remains, however, are the human connections. The ties that Simon made in his earliest days sustain him even once the cafe is no more. The family he so carefully cultivated survives, a reminder of the strength and importance of human connections.