Take a photo of a barcode or cover
A review by jefflandale
Transit by Anna Seghers
2.0
"I had definitely decided to secure a transit visa for myself. Back then it was all a game for me. Not so for the others waiting in the lobby..." This passage, late in Anna Segher's Transit encapsulates the odd and dramatically inert perspective from which the story of Marseilles' bored and anxious refugees is told. Despite having escaped from a Nazi concentration camp before the book begins (set in 1937, before they were converted to extermination camps), the nameless 20-something narrator does not take war, death, or the threat of death seriously. This isn't a humorous book by any means - it is, according to the flap copy, "existential," which apparently means apathetic.
The plot, such as it is, centers on a narrator who, tasked with delivering a letter to the novelist Weidel, finds him dead from suicide in Paris. Fleeing the advancing Nazis to Marseilles, he takes on Weidel's identity mostly by accident of having his papers. Mostly bored, he becomes enamored with a mysterious woman named Marie. She has taken up with a young doctor, but needs her husband and his papers to receive the necessary documentation to get out of the continent before the arrival of the Nazis.
A thrilling race against time to flee the European catastrophe of the 20th century? An exciting tale of double-identities, secrets, and lies? An examination of the community that forms around flight and the desire to survive? Hardly. The plot meanders through bureaucratic meetings where our passive protagonist only half cares if he is found out, and his frankly reprehensible efforts to separate the mysterious woman and her doctor lover so that he can take her place. "There she was, squatting in one corner of the room. I had won. It was as if she were my trophy." Gross!
The saving grace of the novel are the side-characters and stories of refugees, some told across the novel, others in vignettes lasting no more than a few paragraphs: the bald man the novel's narrator keeps running into who is so obsessed with fleeing that he has forgotten why it is so important; the extended family of an old matriarch, all given the papers needed to escape the threat of internment - except the great-grandmother herself who is denied on the grounds that she only has a few months left to live; and maybe a dozen other stories. These are so much more interesting than the main one that it is infuriating when they are overshadowed by it, such as when our nameless narrator's creepy obsession with Marie distracts him from the story of a French Foreign Legionnaire: "I heard my companion's voice, and I wasn't sure whether he'd been talking all this time or not." It's unfortunate that Seghers' chose this protagonist to be the one who is talking all this time.
The plot, such as it is, centers on a narrator who, tasked with delivering a letter to the novelist Weidel, finds him dead from suicide in Paris. Fleeing the advancing Nazis to Marseilles, he takes on Weidel's identity mostly by accident of having his papers. Mostly bored, he becomes enamored with a mysterious woman named Marie
Spoiler
who, not very surprisingly, is Weidel's wifeA thrilling race against time to flee the European catastrophe of the 20th century? An exciting tale of double-identities, secrets, and lies? An examination of the community that forms around flight and the desire to survive? Hardly. The plot meanders through bureaucratic meetings where our passive protagonist only half cares if he is found out, and his frankly reprehensible efforts to separate the mysterious woman and her doctor lover so that he can take her place. "There she was, squatting in one corner of the room. I had won. It was as if she were my trophy." Gross!
The saving grace of the novel are the side-characters and stories of refugees, some told across the novel, others in vignettes lasting no more than a few paragraphs: the bald man the novel's narrator keeps running into who is so obsessed with fleeing that he has forgotten why it is so important; the extended family of an old matriarch, all given the papers needed to escape the threat of internment - except the great-grandmother herself who is denied on the grounds that she only has a few months left to live; and maybe a dozen other stories. These are so much more interesting than the main one that it is infuriating when they are overshadowed by it, such as when our nameless narrator's creepy obsession with Marie distracts him from the story of a French Foreign Legionnaire: "I heard my companion's voice, and I wasn't sure whether he'd been talking all this time or not." It's unfortunate that Seghers' chose this protagonist to be the one who is talking all this time.