The Little Aimless Library: Transit by Anna Seghers

 I'd like to try something a bit different today: a review of a normal book, something a little afield of the sort of geeky prose this blog was created to discuss. Another ambition of mine, aside from inspiring non-Who fans to give Faction Paradox a shot, is to get Who and Faction Paradox fans to broaden their horizons. As I've alluded to in the past, genre and series fiction - for a variety of reasons - can be an isolating place to be. There is little belief in movement to and from this realm, both from those who read it and those who don't. I'd like to start doing short, snappy reviews of non-Who books - non-genre books, even - to get some of y'all out of your comfort zones. I've tentatively titled this post "The Little Aimless Library" in reference to my Aimless Thoughts series. Subject to change, of course.

    The book I'd like to talk about today is Transit by Anna Seghers, a 1944 novel about refugees in the second World War, translated from the original German by Margot Dembo and published by the NYRB. It isn't sci-fi in the slightest. If that's too far a leap, may I also suggest Chana Porter's The Seep? It's a fairly recent sci-fantasy story of a sinister future utopia that's just brimming with weird ideas. A favorite scene has the protagonist witness somebody sitting on a bench with a bowl of goldfish, eating them alive and crying hysterically of grief whenever one dies in their mouth. I didn't ever get as attached as I'd hoped to the cast, but I can appreciate elements of most characters. The main character is a middle-aged trans woman, which I found deeply refreshing in a media climate that seems unwilling to acknowledge queers older than thirty. Her actions are driven by the loss of her wife, who commits suicide through turning herself into a baby. It's a solid genre book full of great worldbuilding, which might be more your speed than the historical melodrama I'm actually here to discuss.

    Though, come to think of it, Transit has a number of things in common with my usual wheelhouse. Thematically, at least. It's about refugees being screwed over on the fringes of the second World War. Faction Paradox, generally speaking, is about civilians caught in the crossfire of a Time War. And, at its best, Doctor Who's hero is depicted as a kind of refugee in their own right, wandering aimlessly through the universe and doing what they can to help the innocent victims of cosmic-scale tragedies. Morally, the protagonist of this book is on similar footing; he spends a good chunk of his time in the book helping others to leave Marseille, often to his own detriment.

    Though really, this has more to do with his deeply-rooted uncertainty. Our hero is kind of a pathetic pushover. Personally, he has no ambitions. No idea what to tell people when they ask what he'll be doing for work when he gets to whatever country will take him. He doesn't care what happens to him - this changes, subtly, through the novel but his lack of drive is always the plot's driving force. Politically, he's a well-informed man who escaped a camp. Yet he holds no particularly strong feelings about any of the war's major powers. Against his will he assumes the identity of a refugee who killed himself - Weidel, a writer whose work didn't appeal to the fascist Spanish government. This causes some issues, though honestly not as many as you might expect. Early on it's just one of many roadblocks that inevitably crop up while negotiating for one visa or another. A twist - which, without spoiling anything, I have mixed feelings on - in the final third renders this lie crucial to the climax. I just wish more had been done with it prior to that. Some greater confrontation about the many differences between the narrator and Weidel.

    The book is, admittedly, not about great confrontations of any kind. The war is some big, ugly, distant thing which is only relevant for the fact the setting happens to be where some of its displaced survivors wound up. Neither side is heroic - the Nazis are bastards, of course, but the governments of any given Allied country are only represented through their bureaucrats. The focus here is on the people stuck between fascism and red tape. What fills the pages, mostly, is a melodrama involving the man who wasn't Weidel and the people he stumbles upon throughout Marseille. He lives in a hotel and spends too much time getting drunk and eating pizza. He has strange conversations with men and unfulfilling romances with women. He begins to recognize all too many of the refugees and slowly builds a social circle. A mysterious, beautiful woman pokes her head into a cafe he frequents and he becomes transfixed. By the end, the book is as much about her and the doctor she's traveling with as it is about the narrator. She and the narrator, both equally naive, stumble through life together; him with no direction and her with far too much.

    His observations about the world range from aimless and clumsy (though I wonder how much of that is because of the translation?) to surprisingly astute. Given Seghers' own experiences as a refugee, there's no doubt she snuck many of her own observations into the mouth of the narrator, a man who isn't otherwise written as particularly literate. Some of his descriptions of people haven't aged with much grace - see his musing on p.221 that a broken woman with no future would've at least had "hope" in an era when a man could've bought her as a slave. Observations like one made slightly earlier, on p.214, more than make up for it: "As a little boy I often went on school trips. [...] our teacher assigned us a composition on the subject, 'Our school trip'. [...] And in the end it seemed to me that I experienced the school trips, Christmas, the vacations, only so that I could write a composition about them. And all those writers who were in the concentration camp with me, who escaped with me, it seems to me that we lived through these most terrible stretches in our lives just so we could write about them: the camps, the war, escape, and flight."

    Whether two hundred pages of drunken melodrama and uneven commentary on the lives of refugees is a story worth telling is, of course, highly subjective. I found it slow but worthy going, myself. Certainly this isn't a book to take in all at once. It's about a man a

staving off boredom while he waits for forces beyond his control to change his life for him, so of course it in itself becomes boring at times. This isn't a weakness, however, as it so effectively immerses you in an under-discussed group within history's most discussed war. Take it in a little at a time and I think you'll find it's a fairly rewarding read.