Transit / Anna Seghers 257 pp.

Transit was written in 1942; this English translation appeared in 2013.   Seghers was a German-Jewish intellectual who fled Europe for Mexico during the war, but returned to live the remainder of her life in East Germany.  A weird but sort of entrancing book, it is the story of  an unnamed protagonist who winds up in Marseille after fleeing first a German concentration camp, and then a French one.  His time in Marseille, "the end of Europe," as he calls it, is spent shuffling from one office or consulate to another assembling the necessary visas to leave the Continent on one of the ships leaving for Lisbon or Madagascar or elsewhere.  No one used the word 'Kafkaesque' at the time of the book's writing, I suppose, but the sordid bureaucratic foolishness of these attempts fits the description perfectly.  The plot, such as it is, involves the narrator's attempts to persuade another woman to leave with him, even though she is attached to a different man.  I can't say I grasped all the nuances of the plot, or the symbolism - some from Greek mythology, some from Christianity, and doubtless others that I didn't identify.  But it certainly wasn't like anything else I've read recently, which I always enjoy.