The Café With No Name

~ Jane ~ 12 Comments
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It’s Vienna in 1966 when 31 year old Robert Simon takes over the café opposite the market.

Orphaned in the war, Robert lived with the Sisters of Mercy. At 15 he left school able to read and write, took up odd jobs and then began working in the market, unloading crates, chopping vegetables or mending hinges. He’s practical, conscientious, punctual and likeable. He lodges with a war widow, Martha Pohl and keeps himself to himself.

As soon as he gets the keys for the café he begins work; scrubbing the walls, painting the furniture, cleaning the stove, burning pieces of bark and fir to rid the kitchen of its sour smell and decides what he’ll serve – beer and wine, coffee and lemonade; bread and dripping with or without onions and freshly pickled gherkins. But what should it be called? he discusses names with Johannes Berg, the butcher, but they all seem a bit conceited until they agree:

‘”Maybe it doesn’t matter after all,’ the butcher said, thinking it over. ‘I mean, the Danube existed long before anyone called it the Danube. So your café can just have no name, and that’s fine.'”

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Just A Little Dinner

~ Jane ~ 16 Comments
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It’s the last few days of August, the holiday in the Langueduc is over and it’s back to work in the stifling heat of Paris. Johar’s been offered the promotion she’s always wanted but playing it cool, she’s told the boss she’ll let him know her decision later. Hot and uncomfortable in her to-tight suit worn to impress, Johar makes her way to Étienne’s apartment forty five minutes late.

Her husband Rémi, an economics teacher, arrived on time, and is settling into a bottle of whisky from the depths of a sofa.

She’s arrived! Étienne is delighted, he’s been suffering Rémi all evening, waiting for Johar, the one person who might save him. He’s made some terrible decisions at work that have lost him clients; he could lose his job and with that his lifestyle. Could Johar and the enormous company she works for become his clients? He’s going to smooch and simper, suck up and flatter for all he’s worth.

The food is in the kitchen with Claudia, Étienne’s girlfriend of two years, she’s cooking and hiding in a black dress and a face of stone.

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Six Degrees from Yesteryear

~ Jane ~ 12 Comments
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The first Saturday of the month is time for Six Degrees of Separation hosted by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best and this month Kate has chosen Yesteryear as our starting point.

A ‘tradwife’ influencer, living the rustic dream with her handsome husband and six gorgeous children wakes up to find herself in the harsh reality of 1855 – is it a nightmare, an elaborate hoax, a twisted reality show, or something far more sinister? I haven’t read this but it does sound fun. ‘A gripping, electrifying novel that is as darkly funny as it is frightening, Yesteryear is a gimlet-eyed look at tradition, fame, faith, and the grand performance of womanhood’

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A Tree Grows In Brooklyn

~ Jane ~ 28 Comments
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This is a book I had never heard of until I joined the Classics Club, where it seemed to be everywhere, so I added it to my second list, based really on its lovely title, the colours of the cover and curiosity.

Written in 1943 it’s the story of New York, its people, trade and local politics at the turn of the 20th century. It’s a domestic history told through the Nolan family who live in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and primarily Francie, who’s 11 when the novel opens in 1912 and we meet her sitting on the fire escape, reading her Saturday library book by the tree that grows in the yard.

‘The one tree in Francie’s yard was neither a pine nor a hemlock. It had pointed leaves which grew along green switches which radiated from the bough and made a tree which looked like a lot of opened green umbrellas. Some people called it the Tree of Heaven. No matter where its seed fell, it made a tree which struggled to reach the sky. It grew in boarded-up lots and out of neglected rubbish heaps and it was the only tree that grew out of cement.
It grew lushly, but only in the tenements districts.’

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Just Watching: No Other Land

~ Jane ~ 7 Comments
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This award winning documentary is a co production between Palestine and Norway and is the directorial debut of four activists, journalists and filmmakers from both sides of the political divide. Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal are Palestinian; Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, Israeli.

Basel Adra, has been resisting the forced displacement of his people by Israel’s military in the Masafer Yatta region of the occupied West Bank since he was a child. Yuval Abraham, a Jewish Israeli journalist joins him and together they form an unexpected friendship. Using film recorded by Adra of his family and neighbours and fresh film shot by cinematographer Rachel Szor, the phone footage and handheld camera gives a searingly personal record of the destruction.

As bulldozers tear down their homes and school, soldiers declare the area a designated Israeli military firing zone; and families who have ties to the land lasting centuries, watch in disbelief before they move into the caves.

This is a vital, urgent, documentation of conflict where the personal is very much the political. Adra, under constant threat as he continues to film, and Yuval in a quieter moment wonder about the huge gap in their living conditions. Will Adra ever be able to visit Yuval in his home where he enjoys freedom and security? ‘Maybe’ says Adra.

Shocking and heartbreaking, moving and poignant; No Other Land was selected for the Panorama section at the 74th Berlin International Film Festival, where it had its world premiere in 2024, winning the Panorama Audience Award for Best Documentary Film and the Berlinale Documentary Film Award. It also won Best Documentary Feature Film at that year’s Oscars.

Through a Glass, Darkly

~ Jane ~ 27 Comments
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It’s the autumn term at Brereton, an exclusive girls’ school in New York. The new art mistress young Faustina Crayle is sketching on the lawn when her friend Gisela, joins her; but as she gets nearer she notices that although Faustina is still sketching her movements have slowed, weighted and languid as if in slow motion. A breeze springs up and stirs the branches overhead, and Gisela hears a cry from an open window. She runs over to the library and sees two girls. Beth and Meg have been watching Miss Crayle painting but Beth has fainted because Faustina is sitting in the armchair of the library.

Faustina’s a quiet, cowed person who doesn’t understand why everyone’s nervous around her and when she’s asked to leave the school immediately, without reference, she has no idea why, even though she was asked to leave her previous school in the same way. Gisela von Hohenems, however, isn’t cowed and contacts her friend Dr. Basil Willing, a psychiatrist working with the District Attorney’s office.

Gisela’s European and talks about the old countries and the fetch of English Folklore, Doppelgangers from Germany and the Gavar Vore of the Celts; of a story in Goethe’s memoirs and of the 19th-century case of Émilie Sagée, a French schoolteacher haunted by her own fetch. Basil listens with interest, but the tradition of the double is usually associated with death.

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Our Spoons Came From Woolworths

~ Jane ~ 24 Comments
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Sophia is looking back over 8 years to the time when she was 20 and first met Charles on a train. He was 20 too and they were both carrying portfolios, which is what gets them talking. As soon as they’re 21 they decide to marry secretly, and using the £10 Charles has been paid for painting a screen they set up home together. It’s jolly and skittish, money’s a bit tight but still, everything’s done on instinct, with no thought for days ahead. They paint the walls of their tiny flat yellow, and all their furniture duck-egg green with a dash of sea green. The sun shines, it never rains, and even London is shimmering, fresh and green.

‘We had a proper tea-set from Waring and Gillow, and a lot of blue plates from Woolworths; our cooking things came from there, too. I had hoped they would give us a set of real silver teaspoons when we bought the wedding-ring, but the jeweller we went to wouldn’t,
so our spoons came from Woolworths, too’.

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Six Degrees from The Post Office Girl

~ Jane ~ 16 Comments
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It’s the first Saturday in the month and that means it’s time for 6 Degrees of Separation hosted by Kate at Book Are My Favourite and Best. This month Kate has chosen Stefan Zweig’s posthumously published novel The Post Office Girl to begin our chain. I haven’t read it but as he’s firmly on my list of authors to get to know, I’ll make this my introduction to his writing. It’s about Christine, a post office worker in Vienna at the end of the 1st world war. A wealthy American Aunt arrives and takes Christine to Switzerland where she’s introduced to a life of hotel luxury and a boy called Ferdinand. Wealthy aunts mean Bertie Wooster, but I’m going with Vienna for my first link and that’s to Lorac’s Murder in Vienna.

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Other Voices, Other Rooms

~ Jane ~ 12 Comments
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After the death of his mother, thirteen year old Joel Harrison Knox leaves his home in New Orleans to live with his father who abandoned him, in Alabama. First he must take a train to Biloxi, then the bus to Paradise Chapel where he’ll need to stay at the Morning Star Cafe until arrangements can be made to transfer him to Noon City. He’s a delicate boy, too pretty and fair skinned, travelling with his grandfather’s suitcase; he was an important figure in the Civil War, ‘you’ve read about him in history books, I guess’, the case is colourful with stickers from Venice to Cairo, Paris to Bombay. Radclif, the guy downing beers at the cafe thinks Joel needs mussing up a bit; but he gives him a lift anyway, and finally at Noon City Joel meets Romeo and Jesus Fever who take him the last three miles to Skully’s Landing.

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Guard Your Daughters

~ Jane ~ 19 Comments
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Take a large house somewhere in England, surround it with gardens, and fill it with five teenage sisters, well four for most of the action, Pandora the eldest has married and escaped to live in London; give them a loving father, a writer who spends most of his time in his study, and a mother who spends most of her time in her bedroom.

The girls take it in turns to cook, take care of their parents and educate themselves. Thisbe is a theatrical and budding poet, Morgan is our narrator and a musician, Cressida gardens and Teresa the youngest reads and reads. It’s an artistic, eccentric, quietly bohemian household where the girls bake and squabble, laugh and chat and sometimes wonder if they’ll ever get to meet anyone else, particularly any males.

It could be the setting for a disgustingly self satisfied group of pampered people, except that somehow everything isn’t quite right. It isn’t the 1930’s, it’s 1953, so why aren’t the girls at school? Their father isn’t just a writer, he’s a famous bestselling author, they’re rich, so why don’t they have a telephone or a car? Why are they so cut off? And why are they so protective of their mother?

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