Transit

by Rosaire Appel

Excludes in the manner of a nightmare that has its own interior logic but can be neither resolved nor completely understood
 
In transiT , the reader is cast in the role of a stranger caught in a moldering, inconsequential city, a stranger thrown in among strangers. Chance encounters and haphazard eavesdropping present the local conditions. The climate is steamy and oppressive. The plumbing is bad. The population is threatened by disease and torpor. Private emotions pushed to the edge erupt in public spaces. In the café, a pivotal space, a young man toys with a glass. He sets it closer to the edge of the table—will he push it over? The floor is tile; the sound would be brilliant. A man who is ill forces himself to trudge to the top of a hill for a view. Such are some of the incidents in transiT—only partially witnessed, and often from more than one perspective.
 
These incidents are repeatedly intruded upon by ambient fragments of conversation, reveries, obsessions, fits of passion, and voices reading aloud from an outdated book on survival in the tropics—which includes advice on how to tread servant, sickroom manners, the preservation of kid gloves. In transiT , language is used subtractively; accumulation does not ensure understanding.
 
At one point a statue is bombed. But the reader, as stranger, knows neither the history nor the politics of the place and cannot know what to make of it. This brings into focus our helplessness in the face of exclusion.
 

133 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1993

Reviews

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 4 out of 5]

She speaks of tomorrow as a definite location, as if she could go to its door any time, turn the knob and walk into tomorrow. [...] Yet despite her sureness, the air in the passage that leads to tomorrow occasionally thickens. She has to push to get through it. A concentration accumulates around her as the present thickens and blocks out tomorrow.

Initial shock of the disjointed text like a cold shower transitions to the slow sinking into a thick mud bath of mysterious disorientation.

A meticulous voice, a dry, closed circuit, moves like a shadow into the foreground. A shadow is merely some shade in transit, a plane of parallel, unconnected, absent light. His voice is merely sound in transit moving steadily over old tracks.

Events within an ambiguous relationship between a nameless man and woman transpire in an unknown tropical country. He was ill, now recovered. She aided in his recovery. His attempts to leave are thwarted. These are memories or not...it is unclear. Maybe some are dreams. Characters exist on the periphery: a chemist and his late wife, a young man in a bar, and others even more obscured. Tipped into the text are excerpts read aloud from a dated book on management of native servants. Repetition of phrases, reconception of scenes from different perspectives unspool tentative narrative threads of a gossamer nature.

Dreams. Do you know what dreams are? Life covered over with common black cloth so thin it seems transparent.

The book strikes an elusive balance between total disorientation and incomplete comprehension. As a reader it is the perfect place for my mind to dwell. After a few introductory chapters of relative abstraction, the novel maintains this vague liminal state where enough intrigue leaks from pinholes made in a shroud of uncertainty until the very end. Influence of the nouveau roman seeps through via Robbe-Grillet and Duras, as well as a kinship with Kavan. Yet it remains wholly original in its inscrutability, offering up only this fragment of self-description in its closing:

Repetition, double voices, interpretation is impossible.