New York Review Books (Paperback)

By: Anna Seghers, Peter Conrad (Introduction by), Margot Bettauer Dembo (Translator)

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Paperback | 7 May 2013

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Paperback
280 Pages

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20.2 x 12.7 x 1.5

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Several years before Waiting for Godot, Seghers wrote this existential, political, literary thriller that explores the significance of literature and the agonies of boredom and waiting with extraordinary compassion and insight.

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.

Industry Reviews

'brilliantly evoked ... a great discovery' Daily Mail 'excellent new transalation' Times Literary Supplement

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Fiction Modern & Contemporary Fiction Action & Adventure War, Combat & Military Adventure Fiction Second World War Fiction Fiction in Translation and Short Stories Fiction in Translation Religious & Spiritual Fiction

New York Review Books (Paperback)

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Paperback

Industry Reviews

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