2023-05-11 12:55:17
Germany’s new bestseller – rightly so
Actor and novelist: Robert Seethaler
Quelle: Guillem Lopez/photoshot/picture alliance
This novel sells better than Stuckrad-Barre: the tale of the rise of an honest worker largely unqualified. Not interesting? Depends on who is writing them. Robert Seethaler turns it into pure relaxation.
MSometimes one could get the impression that books, especially novels, are currently being written by hysterics for hysterics. Which seems to be necessary to even make one’s voice heard in a hollow-and-high-revving, increasingly noisy market. To generate theses and teasers and triggers that fuel debates, thanks to which online subscriptions are made.
This is not to be expected in the following – now would be the ideal moment to step away from this text. It’s not as if nothing happens in Robert Seethaler’s new novel “The Cafe Without a Name” that could be hysterical – a poor people’s neighborhood is gentrified, speculators go around, factories go under, a city awakens, a sociotope changes warns of being overwhelmed by foreigners, an orphan child modestly climbs up and down – but Seethaler doesn’t do it.
He probably couldn’t either. Robert Seethaler is a narrative sanguine, a man-catcher, a philanthropist. This made him an international favorite of readers and booksellers. “Der Trafikant” became an international bestseller and was filmed with Bruno Ganz. “A Whole Life” was nominated for the International Booker Prize.
However, it immediately disqualified him from the current circus of debates. Seethaler doesn’t talk about himself either. Although he actually already does it – if he is not telling about Gustav Mahler, which he would have done better – because his perspective is always that of everyday life, the everyday life of people from the fringes, from the lower middle of society, the “ little people”.
“The little pub on our street”
But he doesn’t show it. Writing literary selfies that deal with origins and classism would not occur to the son of – how do you say – humble origins.
Robert Simon is Robert Seethaler’s most flimsy camouflage to date. They share the initials. And the beginning of their story. In the summer of 1966 – the year in which Seethaler was born in Vienna – the other Robert, a casual worker, girl for everything to do with Vienna’s Leopoldmarkt, opened his café on the corner of Haidtgasse and Leopoldgasse. It never gets a name.
Robert Seethaler’s “The Café Without a Name” is published by Classen (288 pages, 24 euros)
Source: Ullstein book publishers
Robert Simon wanted “to do something that gave his life a decisive validation”. The café becomes what was “The Little Pub on Our Street,” the place that Vader sang about Abraham and made Peter Alexander famous in the mid-1970s. A place where it doesn’t matter where you come from. Where souls find peace for whom the erupting roar of the new Vienna is too much.
Fine dust keeps flying up, the light is beautiful, the seasons come and go, the longing for distance, for love, remains. From the corner of his eye, Seethaler tells of Vienna’s departure into the future. He always sticks to the perception of the tone of those from whose perspective he is telling the story.
Everything is dipped in sepia. It is quiet. And it’s strangely beautiful. Even when it screams, when bridges collapse and life. “The café without a name” is the eye in the literature storm.
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