2023-05-01 22:47:49
When the dead talk to each other in the cemetery, what would their topic be? Of course life. Robert Seethaler carved his novel “Das Feld” from this constellation in 2018, which tells of the fates of a fictional small town from twenty-nine perspectives: “As a living person, think about death. Talking about life as a dead person. What shoud that? Some don’t understand anything about the other,” it says about a world in which there seems to be no more transcendence and no belief in an afterlife.
Seethaler has the talent to create characters and landscapes without any chatter or clumsiness in the clean and unfussy language so typical of him. As in his bestseller “A Whole Life”, which was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2014, he likes to combine reality-saturated precision with stylistic restraint. In just 150 pages, he actually portrays the whole life of a limping day laborer who has hardly ever left his valley. The writer, who was born in Vienna in 1966 and has lived in Berlin for many years, looks at the microcosms of such supposedly small worlds as if through a magnifying glass.
Literary trick like in “Der Trafikant”
After his recent literary excursion with Gustav Mahler on an ocean liner to New York (“The Last Set”, 2020), Seethaler returns to his beginnings spatially and materially in his new novel. The time is different than in his early surprise hit “Der Trafikant” from 2012 about the fictional encounter of a country boy from Attersee with Siegmund Freud in Vienna at the turn of the year 1937/38. “The Café Without a Name” is set in post-war Vienna, but the literary trick is similar. Because just as “Der Trafikant” achieves effects, not least because he speculates on the reader’s historical awareness and does not even talk about the horror that Vienna, Europe and yes the whole world is heading for, it also holds up omniscient narrators in the “Café without a name” with allusions to this past that is still so bitingly close.
Of course, the eponymous café has nothing in common with the Viennese coffee house. It is a simple, outdated inn that, in addition to coffee, tea and raspberry soda, mainly serves alcohol and lard sandwiches. And the clientele is as far away from the middle-class Viennese coffee house visitor who philosophizes about the world as a novelist or ministerial counselor as was the first from the second district of Vienna, where the novel is based.
Portrait of a certain Viennese milieu
Seethaler’s characters have always been taciturn, often unable to make sense of themselves and the fortunes of their lives. Here it is written all over their foreheads how traumatic they are from what happened just twenty years ago. The linchpin of the “Trafikanten” was the tobacconist run by a war invalid (of the First World War). Here the café is the central setting and crossroads of sometimes stray figures. The occasional worker Robert Simon opened it in 1966 on Karmelitermarkt, at that time one of the poorest and dirtiest areas of Vienna, where the heaps of wartime debris have still not been cleared away and local telephone connections are a rarity. Thirty-one-year-old Simon, a war widow’s lodger, feels “the pounding in his heart” when he enters the dusty guest room with the faded wallpaper for the first time.
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