Transit by Anna Seghers

Transit by Anna Seghers

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.

Anna Seghers (1900-1983) was born in Mainz, Germany, into an upper-middle-class Jewish family. She published her first story in 1924 and received the Kleist Prize for her first novel in 1929. After World War II she moved to East Berlin, where she became an emblematic figure of East German letters, actively championing the work of younger writers from her position as the president of the Writers Union and publishing at a steady pace. Her novels Transit and The Seventh Cross are also available from NYRB Classics.

Margot Bettauer Dembo (1928-2019) translated the works of many authors. She was awarded the Goethe-Institut/Berlin Translation Prize in 1994 and the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize in 2003. For NYRB Classics she translated Transit and The Seventh Cross by Seghers and Grand Hotel by Vicki Baum.

Ingo Schulze is a German novelist and short story writer. His most recent novels include Adam and Evelyn, Oranges and Angels, Peter Holtz, and The Righteous Murderers.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781590176252
ISBN 10	1590176251
Title	Transit
Author	Anna Seghers
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	The New York Review of Books, Inc
Year published	2013-05-07
Number of pages	280
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.