Anna Seghers novel “Transit” comes to Iranian bookstores

TEHRAN – (Iranart)- German writer Anna Seghers’s novel “Transit” has been published in Persian by the Qoqnus publishing house in Tehran.

Setareh Notaj is the translator of the book first published in 1944.

Seghers is famous for depicting the moral experience of the Second World War.

“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.

In 2018, German director Christian Petzold adapted the novel as a film of the same name. 

He transposed the plot to the twenty-first century in some respects, using contemporary settings and ambiguous references to political issues. 

It is still set in Marseilles, a major center of North African migrants to France, and now also a transit point of refugees from other countries seeking asylum and resettlement in the West.

source: Tehran Times