432. Transit

Transit
Anna Seghers
1944

Around 290 pages

I know I'm a broken record, but it's really been a hot minute since we've had a female author. Now that Virginia Woolf is, er, unavailable, I can only imagine this trend will continue. Oh well, I'll enjoy it while it lasts. This is another good novel to capture the current mood of waiting, always waiting.

Our narrator has escaped from a concentration camp and is now trying to get out of France. His friend Paul asks him to deliver a letter to a man named Weidel in Paris, but the narrator learns that Weidel has committed suicide. With no way of getting out because bureaucracy is a nightmare, the narrator takes Weidel's identity to get his papers, which becomes morally dubious when he starts to fall for Weidel's widow. That actually sounds like the set up for a romantic comedy. You know, except for the Nazis.

I might be incorrect about this, but this feels like one of the first World War II novels to reference the concentration camps specifically, and even now we aren't really dwelling on it. This was still a moving story and Anna Seghers is undeniably a bad ass, having escaped Nazi controlled Germany to get to France. 

RATING: ****-

Interesting Facts:

Adapted to film in 2018.

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