Saturday 25 November 2017

transit [anna seghers]

Transit is a novel, set in Second World War Marseilles. The unnamed masculine narrator is in flight from Germany, keeping one step ahead of the Nazis. He ends up being another one who lands in the last open port in France, waiting for a ship which will permit him to escape Europe. However, the narrator proves to be a jaundiced, disengaged figure. On his way to Marseilles he stops off in Paris and somehow inherits the identity of a dead writer whose wife, he learns from a letter plans on leaving him. Once the narrator comes across the dead man’s wife, he inevitably falls in love with her. Meanwhile, in a port city that is at once ferverish and dull, he half-heartedly goes about the business of seeking the permits he requires to both remain and leave. He is caught in a life-and-death Kafkaesque game, but the writing strips the drama out of the scenario, because the only thing the narrator is interested in his ersatz wife, whom he dreams of fleeing with. His machinations are all targeted towards trying to achieve this dream, albeit done in the knowledge that his actions are morally dubious. However, what does this mean in a world where the need for survival trumps any moral instinct? 

Seghers’ novel is a downbeat text that feels wilfully anti-dramatic. Her characters are stuck in limbo, somewhere between the hell they are fleeing from and the heaven that might await, should they escape. She casts a surgical eye over this black joke of history. It’s as though the life and death scenario, with all the drama this might implicate, is secondary to the way in which history has cut and pasted people’s lives in a manner that could never have been anticipated. Like her narrator, the author’s eye is distant and ironic. Every now and again the gods play with people to remind them that they exist. When that happens, the futility of being human becomes achingly apparent. 

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