Robert Seethaler’s characters are unassuming, resilient and witness to a world that seems to rage especially around them.  It is 1966, Robert Simon has just fulfilled his dream by taking over a Robert Simon, an ordinary man whose blue eyes “were the only handsome thing about him”, and who takes over a rundown café in “ one of the poorest and dirtiest” districts in bustling Vienna. He recruits a barmaid Mila, and soon the customers flock in. Factory workers, market traders, elderly ladies, a wrestler, a painter, an unemployed seamstress in search of a job, each bringing their own stories … Continue reading Everyday heroism of one community