Reviews

"But I knew deep down in my bones--of course I didn't tell her this--that love sometimes goes along with suffering, that there's also death, separation, and hardship, and that happiness can overtake you for no reason at all, as can the sadness into which it often imperceptibly turns."

Love story. War story. Refugee story. A story about a story. This is a book about liminal existences, the tricks of time and the transitory nature of everything.

In the middle of WWII a German work camp escapee using the name Seidler gets hold of the documents of a writer named Weidel through some chance encounters and a visit to Paris. Europe is a storm of violence and of chaos. Despite running from and dodging death many times, Seidler, in a somewhat detached manner, makes the decision to go to Marseille. "I had always wanted to see Marseille...I felt like going to a big city."

Once in Marseille, a city filled with people trying to leave the country, Seidler quickly learns the transit game: various documents and visas, official stamps of approval needed to leave the country, book passage, transfer through other countries, arrive in a country, even an official paper to stay in Marseille that proves you don't wish to stay in Marseille. Seidler, again because of his detachment and because of bureaucratic assumptions, takes on the identity of Weidel.

The longer Seidler/Weidel stays in Marseille, the more he becomes aware of the transitory lives all around him, slowly understanding the urgency, the finality of certain decisions, the luck involved. He meets Marie, Weidel's wife, desperately looking for her husband while also having taken up with a doctor. Marie changes everything. Seidler's transit game becomes more complicated the more he becomes involved with Marie and the doctor. Doors open. Doors close. With each swing a life is possibly saved or a life is probably doomed. Refugees all over the world today are proof that the transit game continues.

"Each of these ready-to-leave souls has experienced as much as a whole generation of humankind normally might. One will start telling another next to him he escaped sure death three times already, but the man next to him has also avoided death at least three times himself. He listens only superficially, then he elbows his way into a gap in the line, where another man will tell him how he has escaped death. And while they're waiting there, the first bomb drops on the city they had wanted to go to in search of peace, visas expire, a cable arrives on the other side of the door saying that the borders of the country that seemed like the last hope of refuge are being closed. And if you can't wrangle yourself forward with trickery and pure meanness to be among the first ten who can then race over to the Transports Maritimes with their exit visas, you'll find the passenger list will already be closed. Nothing can help you then."

ameboleyn's review against another edition

Go to review page

2.0

This is one of those books where it takes like 150 pages to get to the point and the point is something about being meaningless/up-in-the-air/something-else-is-more-important-than-yourself and you want to be mad about it but it also makes sense so.....
But also this book was eh. I thought it was written by a guy at first ? Just because there was so many cringeworthy descriptions of women and also the main girl is a Dream Girl whose whole relevance to the story is her beauty/marriage.