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A review by raulbime
Transit by Anna Seghers
5.0
"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."
These past two weeks have been terrible for me. A personal crisis that came at the most inopportune of times–as they often do, threatened and disrupted a lot. My reading of course stagnated, and while I still reel from it, the worst seems to have passed. Reading pace in a way has always been an unconscious gauge to how I'm doing, and that I've finally finished this book and gone back to consistently reading others, is a positive sign of the crisis abating.
I learnt of Anna Seghers a while ago through an essay by Christa Wolf. Wolf had highly praised her work, written of the influence it had on her and shared how Seghers had been of help to her as a personal friend. Seghers had quite a life, her books were among those burned by the Nazis during that infamous book burning, she had been jailed by the Gestapo and fled to France where she lived in exile until she left for further exile in Mexico.
This book is set in France during the early period of German occupation. The protagonist, like Seghers, is a German who flees to France. Having escaped a concentration camp, he goes to Paris but soon leaves when the city falls to the Germans, and then heads to Marseille. However while still in Paris he discovers the documents of a dead writer named Weidel, among them a manuscript, and begins to adopt the dead man's identity as his own. One dramatic turn after another ensues as the protagonist encounters people that Weidel knew and the dead man's past enjoins his present and moulds his future.
One of the similarities between Wolf and Seghers is the antithesis of the unreliable narrator. A protagonist who is self-aware of their faults, and attempts to be as honest as they can be to the reader even if they're not always honest to themselves or the other characters. A reassuring voice that a reader can almost completely trust, and I enjoy stories with such narrators.
Among the reasons this book will become an unforgettable experience for me, other than the great storytelling, is how eerily familiar it was. Since I was two I've lived in exile and in a place, just like France during the second world war, meant to be transitory. A transitory country is one that has no solid structures for refugee integration. It's a place that harbours refugees with plans for either resettlement or repatriation. The precarity of this situation, the despair and restlessness and listlessness of those caught in this limbo while still unhealed from the violence they've fled, the harassment and police raids and arrests and deportations, the bureaucracy of documentation, the grief of separation among those who leave and those who stay, the physical and spiritual deaths, and the survival of all this were all uncannily familiar to me and so brilliantly captured. The figures in this story could have easily been people I've known since I was a child. All this familiarity meant that a mixture of wonderment and aversion accompanied me as I read this.
These past two weeks have been terrible for me. A personal crisis that came at the most inopportune of times–as they often do, threatened and disrupted a lot. My reading of course stagnated, and while I still reel from it, the worst seems to have passed. Reading pace in a way has always been an unconscious gauge to how I'm doing, and that I've finally finished this book and gone back to consistently reading others, is a positive sign of the crisis abating.
I learnt of Anna Seghers a while ago through an essay by Christa Wolf. Wolf had highly praised her work, written of the influence it had on her and shared how Seghers had been of help to her as a personal friend. Seghers had quite a life, her books were among those burned by the Nazis during that infamous book burning, she had been jailed by the Gestapo and fled to France where she lived in exile until she left for further exile in Mexico.
This book is set in France during the early period of German occupation. The protagonist, like Seghers, is a German who flees to France. Having escaped a concentration camp, he goes to Paris but soon leaves when the city falls to the Germans, and then heads to Marseille. However while still in Paris he discovers the documents of a dead writer named Weidel, among them a manuscript, and begins to adopt the dead man's identity as his own. One dramatic turn after another ensues as the protagonist encounters people that Weidel knew and the dead man's past enjoins his present and moulds his future.
One of the similarities between Wolf and Seghers is the antithesis of the unreliable narrator. A protagonist who is self-aware of their faults, and attempts to be as honest as they can be to the reader even if they're not always honest to themselves or the other characters. A reassuring voice that a reader can almost completely trust, and I enjoy stories with such narrators.
Among the reasons this book will become an unforgettable experience for me, other than the great storytelling, is how eerily familiar it was. Since I was two I've lived in exile and in a place, just like France during the second world war, meant to be transitory. A transitory country is one that has no solid structures for refugee integration. It's a place that harbours refugees with plans for either resettlement or repatriation. The precarity of this situation, the despair and restlessness and listlessness of those caught in this limbo while still unhealed from the violence they've fled, the harassment and police raids and arrests and deportations, the bureaucracy of documentation, the grief of separation among those who leave and those who stay, the physical and spiritual deaths, and the survival of all this were all uncannily familiar to me and so brilliantly captured. The figures in this story could have easily been people I've known since I was a child. All this familiarity meant that a mixture of wonderment and aversion accompanied me as I read this.