The Austrian writer Robert Seethaler, whose novel A Whole Life was a Man Booker International finalist in 2017, takes a different turn in The Café with No Name, an urban novel set in the Carmelite Market Square in Vienna. The hard work of the quiet protagonist, Robert Simon, who, in 1966, after 10 years of doing odd jobs at the market, takes over a dilapidated café and fixes it up, is part of a continuum of reviving post-war Vienna on the piles of dust, dirt, and rubble.

This is not one of those cozy café novels where, as if by magic, the lives of customers are rehabilitated and changed. The café with no name hosts a loosely-linked working-class community. And it is a community in flux: Vienna keeps changing, and so does Robert.

But the cafe does make a difference to Mila, the waitress, who needed a job after the factory where she worked closed. This is where she meets Rene, her future husband, an alcoholic pugilist who works as a wrestler when he isn’t drunk.

Robert stays in the background, a quiet man with good manners who smooths down eruptive personalities and intervenes in card players’ squabbles. He doesn’t worry about sociable Rose Gebhartl, a sharp-witted regular who keeps her eye out for a handsome man, and ends up in a DJ’s lap, but he has to keep an eye on Blaha, who likes to take his glass eye out, roll it around the bar, and freak out the women.

But perhaps the most poignant scenes unfold when Robert falls in love with Jascha. This pretty young woman comes to the café with an injured pigeon, hoping he will help her save it. (It turns out to be dead.) The couple spend idyllic days together, though she refuses to have sex. It is a beautiful interlude, but her problems prove insoluble.

I don’t quite know how to describe this book. It is not a cozy, but neither is it anti-cozy. I wish I could read it in German, so that I might better understand the tone. I suspect some things are left unsaid in the spare English translation, but I found the book charming and thoughtful. Now I am thinking about the flux in cities, caused by war and lesser crises.