Transit
By: by Anna Seghers ; introduction by Peter Conrad ; translated by Margot Dembo ; afterword by Heinrich Böll
Contributors: Dembo, Margot Bettauer, translator
Series: New York Review Books classics; New York Review Books classics
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2013
Language: eng
Number of pages: 257
ISBN-13: 9781590176252
Subjects: Refugees; World War, 1939-1945; Fiction
Work titles: Transit
Description: "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{u2019}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{u2019}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."--Page 4 of cover.