Transit

INTRODUCED BY STUART EVERS

'They kept streaming into the only port over which the French flag still waved. The masses wanting to leave the continent each week would have manned a giant flotilla. Yet not even one sad little ship was sailing on a weekly basis anymore.'

Having escaped from a Nazi concentration camp in Germany and a work camp in Rouen, the nameless narrator finds himself in the dusty seaport of Marseille. Along the way he was asked to deliver a letter to Weidel, a writer in Paris whom he discovered had killed himself as the Nazis entered the city. Now he is in search of the dead man's wife. He carries Weidel's suitcase, which contains an unfinished novel - and a letter securing Weidel a visa to escape France.

Assuming the name Seidler - though the authorities think he is in fact Weidel - he goes from cafe to cafe looking for Marie, who is in turn anxiously searching for her husband. As Seidler converses with refugees over pizza and wine, their stories gradually break down his ennui, bringing him a deeper awareness of the transitory world they inhabit as they wait and wait for that most precious of possessions: transit papers.

An existential, political and literary thriller first published in 1944, Transit is a multi-layered wartime masterpiece that explores the plight of the refugee with extraordinary compassion and insight.


'Transit belongs to those books that entered my life, and which I continue to engage with in my writing, so much that I have to pick it up every couple years to see what has happened between me and it' Christa Wolf