A gem of a novel, whimsical and bittersweet but never sentimental, with indelible characters and a powerful sense of place.
This is the spirited story of a working-class Viennese cafe and its odd-duck denizens.
Robert Simon, an orphan who endured a hardscrabble youth, is now 31 in the year 1966. He makes a living doing odd jobs in Vienna’s old Karmelitermarkt and rents a furnished room from a war widow whose snoring he finds “strangely touching.” Simon does have some ambition, and when the decrepit old market cafe is put up for rent, he signs a lease and makes it his own. Soon, the place is humming, filled with local patrons—among others, there are yarn-factory girls; Simon’s pal Johannes, the local butcher; the former bill collector Harald, who plays with his glass eye; and Heide the cheesemonger, who feuds with her philandering younger husband, Mischa. When the robust country girl Mila, an out-of-work seamstress, turns up, Simon is persuaded to let her help run the cafe. Mila soon becomes involved with another patron, René, a hulking sometime wrestler. Simon, shy and kind-hearted, takes great pleasure in the cafe’s success. The book meanders pleasantly, though there is some real drama: Simon is severely injured when a furnace beneath the cafe explodes. Some time later, he finds himself falling for an odd Yugoslav woman named Jascha. And during the farewell party for the cafe, a decade after its opening, a nearby bridge collapses. Somehow, the life of the cafe—with its many comic and melancholic moments—seems to mirror an actual life. An earlier novel by this Vienna-born author, A Whole Life (2016), was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. Here, Seethaler shows a great gift for describing how things work as well as the beauty of the natural world. While the premise of lost souls drifting together in a scruffy cafe may not be wildly original, his funny/sad characters are finely drawn and remarkably vivid. Vienna itself is a player here: The Prater amusement park with its famous Reisenrad Ferris wheel, the pastry shop Demel’s, St. Stephen’s Cathedral, and even the Danube all figure in the proceedings.
A gem of a novel, whimsical and bittersweet but never sentimental, with indelible characters and a powerful sense of place.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9798889660644
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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