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Hope springs eternal: The Café with No Name, by Robert Seethaler, reviewed

It’s Vienna, 1966, and a young labourer casts a speculative eye on a ramshackle café in the corner of the Karmelitermarkt, daring to restore it and improve his lot

1 March 2025

9:00 AM

1 March 2025

9:00 AM

The Café With No Name Robert Seethaler, translated by Katy Derbyshire

Canongate, pp.220, 16.99

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 setting is Vienna – not the elegant city of Schönbrunn but the Karmelitermarkt, one of the poorest districts, debris from Allied bombs still filling the basements in 1966.

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