"All this happened, more or less."

I hesitate to review Transit because I don’t feel that I connected with the book at all. Perhaps this prospect was doomed from the outset. I only read the novel because I felt it would be the responsible thing to do since I’ll be coaching Academic Decathlon, and this is the chosen novel to correlate with the 2016-17 topic of WWII. We never enjoy “assigned” books as much as those we chose for ourselves. The fact that I had recently enjoyed two other novels set during WWII, All the Light We Cannot See and The Nightingale , also served to raise my expectations. The further fact that I have studied WWII fairly extensively and have been so deeply moved by such profound writing 1 and art 2 from the period and its survivors also works against a novel like Transit which I find incredibly dull. If you’ve read Hemingway ( The Sun Also Rises , incidentally, was Academic Decathlon’s choice for WWI) or works by some of his fellow expatriates, you will understand the feelings of restlessnes...