By Robert Seethaler
Paperback - £8.99
Robert Seethaler’s fourth novel The Tobacconist is a depiction of a young man’s struggle to find his place in pre-war Austria. As the novel begins, the teenage Franz Huchel is sent to Vienna, to take up the trade of tobacconist under his mother’s friend, Otto Trsnyek.
Seventeen and unused to the ways of the city, Franz is set by his employer to learn the trade of a tobacconist, and he is captivated by one customer in particular: the aged professor, Dr Sigmund Freud. On Freud’s instigation, Franz is to fall passionately and desperately in love with the somewhat indifferent Bohemian girl, Anezka.
Absorbed by his fascination with Freud, Franz finds that he and his employer are the focus of the growing anti-Semitic feeling manifested in Austria in the late 1930s, simply for agreeing to serve the Jewish doctor. He must struggle to defend the shop against physical and verbal attack, Otto against prosecution by the state, and Dr Freud against the spread of Nazism in the build up to the war.
Seethaler’s writing is beautiful and evocative, his characters are vivid, and his novel is well worth the read.