The Suitcase

  
 

The Suitcase (1986)

Sergei Dovlatov

            What a strange, capricious animal memory is. It comes to you unbidden and unexpected: when your nostrils fill with a half-forgotten scent, when your fingers touch an old fabric, when you stub your toe in the middle of the night. Memory is like a distant relative who occasionally drops by your apartment, without phoning beforehand, and sits on your couch like he owns the place, tells you conflicting and confusing things, and drinks up the beer you were saving for yourself. Sergei Dovlatov’s The Suitcase is all about the power of memory: a brief second of autohypnosis while neurons firing at the speed of sound drag us into the crystallized world that exists in the throne of our unconsciousness. Perhaps a smarter man than myself (an actual expert: a neuroscientist or a philosopher, say) could answer this question but are we much more than our memories? Excluding the influences of purely material components that vary wildly between individuals (brain damage, mental retardation, alcoholism, depression, psychopathy) but our personalities are built on our experiences, right?  Have you ever seen a baby? They haven’t had much experience at anything and they’re all the fucking same, but an adult is a nuanced accretion of memory, a mental stalactite. Like your brain is the hardware and your mind is the operating system, that’s the analogy, right? I obviously don’t know anything about how the brain or the mind or our personalities work but, like most things that are probably wrong, that seems like a reasonable assumption. I don’t even know why I brought this up. It has little to do with the topic at hand. Ah, a question for people who have been to college!

The set-up of this book is so simple. One day Dovlatov’s son is in the closet, and stumbles across a battered and forgotten old suitcase. The author says, ah, that’s the suitcase I came to America with. He takes it to the kitchen table and opens it up, spreading out the small, pitiable little articles he brought with him when he left the Soviet Union: three pairs of pea-green Finnish crepe socks, a pair of Nomenklatura half-boots, a decent double-breasted suit, an officer’s belt, a corduroy jacket once owned by the French artist Fernand Léger, a poplin shirt, a winter hat of fake sealskin, and a pair of driving gloves. Each item arouses a memory or set of memories and each one gets its own chapter. That’s it, that’s the conceit of this book. I bet Dovlatov actually did have this suitcase, and did pull it out and look at the items and then wrote about how he felt, what odd things kept on flooding back to him. It wouldn’t shock me, just as it wouldn’t shock me to find out that everything in this book is either completely real or completely fictional. I don’t know if it matters. These stories have the aura of reality. They seem real enough.        

            The real star of the show here is Dovlatov’s voice: it’s very warm, friendly, slightly tired, and more bemused than anything by the absurdity that surrounds him. One of the better tones I’ve ever encountered. It’s the voice of someone you could hang out with. He writes simply and tersely, sort of like a Soviet Bukowski or Saroyan. He is also hilarious. I’m not a funny guy, or the kind of guy who really laughs a lot, outwardly, at much of anything, in short, I don’t think of myself as a guy who is prone to fits of laughter but man this book made me laugh (with noise and everything) more than once. He mines the same kind of humor as say John Fante (another writer who made me laugh) mines; a kind of tired, sad, nostalgic self-mockery. The kind of small laughter you get when you kick yourself for being such an idiotic teenager while being at the same time impressed that you got away with whatever stupid thing it was that you did.

            Dovlatov is a real champion of a writer. He manages to really capture the awkwardness and humiliation that is constantly being piled on the young man who isn’t really successful and doesn’t fit in. The world is a thickheaded, frivolous place, full of idiocies and miseries, and sometimes the only sane response is to shrug a little and take another drink of vodka. Dovlatov puts together an impressive peppering of observations and asides. He’s telling you a story and sometimes he gets digressive and sidetracked. It makes for a good story. Rambling and inclusive.

            Dovlatov charts the course through his life in the USSR, a life that he has left behind for a fresh start in New York City, using these seemingly unimportant, miniscule objects as signposts around which he piles the little memories in a sort of nostalgia cairn. It’s an interesting, comic life. He spends some time as a hoodlum selling black market goods to fat women, apprentices as a stonecutter, is a journalist at an industrial newspaper (oh, the pointlessness of being a journalist in an authoritarian state), joins the Army, is an extremely careless and shitty guard at a military prison, decides to start writing. Along the way he drinks a ton, is grilled by the KGB, gets married, tries to impress some girls and then gets beat up, takes a girl to a Tarkovsky movie (Ivan’s Childhood) gets whipped in the face with a weighted belt-buckle, dresses up like Tsar Nicholas and roams the streets so a dilettante can make an out-of-touch little film that doesn’t matter to anyone. There’s censorship, class divisions (even in a socialist country there are class struggles, the cancer of our age!), striking out with girls, striking out with three girls at once  (and who hasn’t tried that, stand up, I dare you), petty little shuffling scamming, the kind young men dream up to make a little scratch quickly so you take your old lady out for the night and maybe get a bottle of booze. In short it is a funny, human little adventure through the slightly sad corridors of memory, a man’s memory… a man who was once young and reckless and yearning to break free, like we all have been, but is now softened and settled. I imagine everyone in this book has a regrettable haircut. They stamp around in the cold smoking awful communist cigarettes and waiting for the next opportunity that pops up.

            This is the shortest of any of these reviews I’ve done so far. It’s not that I don’t have a lot to say about this book, or that I didn’t like it. Far from it, I thought the book was great, I’d recommend it to anyone who was looking for a quality read. It just wasn’t extremely challenging or provocative (you know, compared to Story of the Eye). It was instead a comfortable, warm blanket, very friendly and inviting. It’s about the unpredictably mercurial little changeling that is memory; the alien and unknowable spirit from preliterate folklore that lives within our skull and time and again pops out from around the corner to shout “I bet you forgot about me, rube,” and you worry that everyone around can see how graspingly paralyzed and desperate you’re being, but they’re all wrapped up in their own heads too and, let’s be honest, wouldn’t take notice of you even if they weren’t.

            I’ve really been rocketing through books recently. Up next I’m reading The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek, which even though I’m only twenty pages in so far promises to be completely the opposite of The Suitcase. Should be a real thrill ride!