Transport 7-41-R

Rating:
Summary: A tense and original post-war novel
Review: A 13-year-old German girl helps an old man smuggle the body ofhis wife through post-WWII refugee camps and transport trains tofulfill her wish to be buried in Cologne.

Degens breathes new life into the familiar WW II genre in this thought-provoking, powerfully metaphoric novel. The nameless heroine is neither a Jew nor a Nazi, but a sharp-witted German teenager with an instinct for survival, a keen eye for the absurdities of war and peace, and a capacity for compassion that she doesn't know exists. The ironies of life in wartime and post-war Germany are explored in detail: students are given good grades for learning one set of historical facts during the war and an opposite set of facts after it, rules and regulations are so arbitrary and changeable that it's pointless to learn them, but violating them can kill you, and a five-day-old corpse can't be buried until it's officially certified dead. While these facts are specific as to a certain time and place, they also have an obvious contemporary relevance. This biting irony that pervades the book is accompanied by a strong element of black comedy, as the narrator and Mr. Lauritzen have to haul a corpse around while pretending that it's still alive, and hoping that no will notice its growing deterioration.

The central relationship between the narrator and Mr. Lauritzen is unusual and moving, as the narrator gradually become his co-conspirator and protector. The supporting characters are sharply drawn, some kind, some truly horrible, and most somewhere in between. The plot's non-stop twists, frustrations, and reversals are very suspenseful, and the simple time-lock element of having to get a body to a graveyard before someone notices that it's dead adds to the urgency of the story.