Transit by Anna Seghers

And yet although all this transit whispering made me feel miserable, it was amazing to think that even though thousands, no, hundreds of thousands, had died in the flames of the air raids and the furious attacks of the Blitzkrieg, there were many more who were born quite without being noticed by the consuls. They hadn't asked for letters of transit, hadn't applied for visas; they were not under the jurisdiction of this place. And what if some of these poor souls, still bleeding physically and spiritually, had fled to this house, what harm could it do to a giant nation if a few of these saved souls, worthy, half-worthy, or unworthy, were to join them in their country--how could it possibly harm such a big country?

Anna Seghers' Transit is set in the city of Marseille during the upheaval of World War II, where people from all over a Europe in turmoil converge, each trying to set sail for somewhere else. This makes Marseille a kind of continental waiting room where people linger for months, waiting for their visa to arrive, for their refugee status to be approved, making a temporary life for God knows how long in a place they have no intention to stay. That is, except for the +narrator, who arrives at Marseille wanting the one thing the authorities will not allow--to stay for good. Through a convoluted series of events I will try to outline here, he ends up using an assumed name: a friend sends him with a letter to a stranger, a semi-famous novelist who turns out to be dead. While trying to return the dead stranger's items to his wife at the consulate, the narrator is mistakenly identified as him, a misidentification he seizes upon in order to gain the transit visa that will allow him, ironically, to stay in Marseille for a time. This is all complicated when he meets the dead man's wife, Marie, with whom he falls in love.

Transit is a funny thing. It takes as its subject a painful stasis, and the book often seems not to be moving forward or toward anything in a way that mirrors this subject. It's hard to figure out the narrator, who is somehow both calculating and reckless. He promises to help Marie get her traveling papers--she has taken up with a handsome doctor who wants to emigrate with her, to make things more complicated--but of course, to do this would mean to take her away from Marseille, so he sort of half-does it and half-doesn't, manipulating her in order to keep her in his presence. Is he a hero, or a scoundrel? It may be that categories like these break down in the great waiting room of Europe. Either way, his voice is unique and magnetic, and he's an interesting character to follow around; a schemer making his way in a world of impenetrable paperwork. In part, it's a satire whose target is the absurd bureaucracy of Europe, whose rubber-stamping seems entirely inadequate to the gravity of world war. More than one person tells the narrator that they have decided to give up and return to the places of their birth, choosing violence and war over red tape.

In fact, it made me think a little of immigration in the United States today, the way, without even the upheaval of world war, we have created a system of perverse and obscure incentives that leaves people with no clear way forward. The strange motionlessness and circularity of Transit made it, for me, a little difficult to really embrace. But I did find it skillful and insightful, and certainly worth reading.