Crossing: A Love Story

Seghers, Anna

ISBN 10: 1935084941 / ISBN 13: 9781935084945

Edité par Diálogos, 2016

Pages intact with minimal writing/highlighting. The binding may be loose and creased. Dust jackets/supplements are not included. Stock photo provided. Product includes identifying sticker. Better World Books: Buy Books. Do Good. N° de réf. du vendeur 9883068-75

Synopsis :

Aboard a cargo ship sailing from Brazil to the German Democratic Republic in the mid-1950s, two men strike up a conversation: newly-qualified doctor, Ernst Triebel, and engineer Franz Hammer, two GDR citizens of contrasting character, brought together by chance on an Atlantic crossing. During the next three weeks Triebel will relate to Hammer what amounts to his life story. Hammer, a reluctant sea passenger, is initially uninterested, but once the love interest of the story's subtitle enters the fray he is gripped until the memorable climax to Triebel's narrative.

With loving attention to detail Anna Seghers describes people and events aboard the ship as the realistic backdrop to an epic yet deeply human story about individual struggle for identity and belonging. Seghers's carefully crafted and controlled narrative is a paean to the art of storytelling.

The reader is invited aboard Seghers's borderless maritime community from the first page to share in this timeless meditation on the joy and pain of human existence.

At the time of its publication in 1971, Crossing was described as the culmination of Anna Seghers's creative endeavors. A committed activist and writer who lived through many of the twentieth century's most horrific political and historical events and tackled them in deeply humanist writing, Seghers's exile literature from the 1940s, in particular The Seventh Cross (1942/46) and Transit (1944), have been widely translated and received international acclaim. But her later work, written as a citizen of the German Democratic Republic, remains largely overlooked in English translation, until now. While the earlier work was set in the horror of World War II, this immaculately crafted novel seeks to counter global polarity during the Cold War era and demonstrates Seghers's firmly internationalist outlook.

"When I speak of Anna Seghers I cannot but think of those who, alongside her, belong to the great writers who have come together out of love for truth, freedom, culture, peace and socialism, yes out of love for the fate of humanity."
--Jorge Amado

"... in terms of the quality of her narrative style and scope of her narrative vision, Seghers was the greatest German woman writer of the twentieth century."
--Helen Fehervary

"Your eyes are used to seeing, perceiving and understanding things unseen, things distant or lost. You capture them in your stories..."
--Pablo Neruda

À propos de l'auteur: Anna Seghers was a writer with a strong sense of social justice, whose work spanned and to a great extent chronicled the major part of the twentieth century. She was born in 1900 in Mainz, Germany, to middle class Jewish parents who named their only child Netty Reiling. Often sick as a child, Netty took solace in books. Netty Reiling was one of the first cohorts of women to enter German higher education, studying art history and sinology at the University of Heidelberg. After completing her studies in 1924, Netty Reiling adopted the pen name of Anna Seghers, and in 1928 her first major success came with publication of The Revolt of the Fishermen of St. Barbara, about a failed attempt by Breton fishermen to break a monopoly. Seghers belonged to a generation of writers in the Weimar Republic who turned their back on a privileged upbringing and, inspired by events in 1917 Russia, formed the Association of Proletarian-Revolutionary Writers. Seghers was blacklisted in Nazi Germany and forced into exile, along with her husband and two small children. She was first in France, from 1933 until 1941, and then Mexico until 1947. She wrote prolifically during this time and engaged in anti-fascist activity alongside many other writers and intellectuals including Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin. While in France Seghers interviewed Nazi concentration camp survivors and escapees, providing material for her most famous and enduring novels, The Seventh Cross (1942) and Transit (1944). Along with Crossing, these works stand as testament to Anna Seghers as an antifascist and modernist writer. Seghers returned to Germany in 1947 as an international bestselling author-in 1944 The Seventh Cross had been made into a Hollywood film starring Spencer Tracy-and was awarded the Büchner prize for services to German literature. Seghers chose to follow her socialist ideals and commit to East Germany. There She became a literary celebrity and fulfilled an important role as chair of the GDR Writers' Union, an office she kept from 1952 to 1978. At the same time she was heavily involved with the international peace movement as the GDR's representative on the World Peace Council, and was a notable signatory of the 1950 Stockholm Appeal for worldwide eradication of nuclear weapons, along with many other writers including friends Pablo Neruda and Jorge Amado. Seghers's writing from the second half of her literary career suffered due to her association with a communist state, and to this day remains largely overlooked in favor of her more famous earlier work. Despite this, her GDR writing period contains many fine examples of the novella and short story form, and highlights her internationalist, antifascist, pacifist stance and her profound concern for the individual, often marginalized, and their need to find a meaningful place in society. Much of this writing focuses on female protagonists and often has a Latin American or Caribbean setting. In public Seghers was reluctant to criticize her regime; however, the attentive reader will find subtle, constructive criticism in her GDR writing as she sought, along with many others, to work from within to create a platform for openness and debate. She was also a highly influential figure for the second generation of GDR writers, perhaps most notably Christa Wolf and Heiner Müller. Despite recurring health problems and an underlying sorrow at the failure of the GDR state to realize the utopian socialist dream, Seghers maintained the revolutionary ideals that were planted in her in the Weimar Republic. The final book she published in her lifetime is a small text containing three short stories about fictional Haitian women in three separate eras of Haitian history. Three Women from Haiti (1980) can be regarded as Seghers's testament as a writer and marks the end of the revolutionary thread than ran throughout this deeply committed writer's work.

Détails bibliographiques

Titre : Crossing: A Love Story
Éditeur : Diálogos
Date d'édition : 2016
Reliure : Couverture souple
Etat : Good