logo
Wrong email address or username
Wrong email address or username
Incorrect verification code
Transit - Anna Seghers, Peter Conrad, Margot Dembo
Transit
by: (author) (author) (author)
4.00 15
Anna Seghers’s Transit is an existential, political, literary thriller that explores the agonies of boredom, the vitality of storytelling, and the plight of the exile with extraordinary compassion and insight.      Having escaped from a Nazi concentration camp in Germany in 1937, and later a camp... show more
Anna Seghers’s Transit is an existential, political, literary thriller that explores the agonies of boredom, the vitality of storytelling, and the plight of the exile with extraordinary compassion and insight.      Having escaped from a Nazi concentration camp in Germany in 1937, and later a camp in Rouen, the nameless twenty-seven-year-old German narrator of Seghers’s multilayered masterpiece ends up in the dusty seaport of Marseille. Along the way he is asked to deliver a letter to a man named Weidel in Paris and discovers Weidel has committed suicide, leaving behind a suitcase containing letters and the manuscript of a novel. As he makes his way to Marseille to find Weidel’s widow, the narrator assumes the identity of a refugee named Seidler, though the authorities think he is really Weidel. There in the giant waiting room of Marseille, the narrator converses with the refugees, listening to their stories over pizza and wine, while also gradually piecing together the story of Weidel, whose manuscript has shattered the narrator’s “deathly boredom,” bringing him to a deeper awareness of the transitory world the refugees inhabit as they wait and wait for that most precious of possessions: transit papers.
show less
Format: paperback
ISBN: 9781590176252 (1590176251)
ASIN: 1590176251
Publisher: NYRB Classics
Pages no: 257
Edition language: English
Bookstores:
Community Reviews
What I Happen to Be Reading At the Moment
What I Happen to Be Reading At the Moment rated it
4.0
The nameless narrator of Anna Seghers' Transit is on the run having escaped a work camp. He is trying to escape the war in Europe by emigrating, and the novel tells the story of mistaken identity, bureaucratic frustrations, and the multifaceted landscape of Marseilles at the beginning of the Second ...
Other editions (4)
Books by Peter Conrad
Books by Margot Dembo
Books by Anna Seghers
On shelves
Share this Book
Need help?