The Suitcase
Six Attempts to Cross a Border
Published on 3. June 2021
Book
Hardback
240 pages
978-1-78733-054-2 (ISBN)
Description
'Frances Stonor Saunders is one of those writers you read no matter what she writes. She is that good... This is family history at its best... the words fizz off the page and flutter in the mind' Sunday Times
Ten years ago, Frances Stonor Saunders was handed an old suitcase filled with her father's papers. 'If you open that suitcase you'll never close it again,' warned her mother. Her father's life had been a study in borders - exiled from Romania during the war, to Turkey then Egypt and eventually Britain, and ultimately to the borderless territory of Alzheimer's. The unopened suitcase seems to represent everything that had made her father unknowable to her in life. Now she finds herself with the dilemma of two competing urges: wanting to know what's in the suitcase, and wanting not to know.
So begins this captivating exploration of history, memory and geography, as Frances Stonor Saunders unpicks her father's and his family's past. Is it possible to bring her father back, to summon once more someone who was distant and elusive when alive? The past is always the history of loss, of black holes, of things gone missing. Life is a long forgetting, even as we live it. The Suitcase is an extraordinary, heroic effort of retrieval, driven by the ache for completion. It is about the silences and stories that protect us, and the borders we construct, literally and figuratively, to fortify our sense of who we are.
'A beautifully written, beautifully composed investigation' TLS 'Books of the year' 2021
Ten years ago, Frances Stonor Saunders was handed an old suitcase filled with her father's papers. 'If you open that suitcase you'll never close it again,' warned her mother. Her father's life had been a study in borders - exiled from Romania during the war, to Turkey then Egypt and eventually Britain, and ultimately to the borderless territory of Alzheimer's. The unopened suitcase seems to represent everything that had made her father unknowable to her in life. Now she finds herself with the dilemma of two competing urges: wanting to know what's in the suitcase, and wanting not to know.
So begins this captivating exploration of history, memory and geography, as Frances Stonor Saunders unpicks her father's and his family's past. Is it possible to bring her father back, to summon once more someone who was distant and elusive when alive? The past is always the history of loss, of black holes, of things gone missing. Life is a long forgetting, even as we live it. The Suitcase is an extraordinary, heroic effort of retrieval, driven by the ache for completion. It is about the silences and stories that protect us, and the borders we construct, literally and figuratively, to fortify our sense of who we are.
'A beautifully written, beautifully composed investigation' TLS 'Books of the year' 2021
Reviews / Votes
Frances Stonor Saunders vividly captures the horror and absurdity of life in the theatre of conflict, and human versatility... The Suitcase is...a study in the meaningful artifice of human experience. -- Katherine Backler * Tablet * Excellent... The Suitcase intrigues and fascinates and causes the reader to reflect on the uneven fates of those families that survived the Holocaust and those that did not. -- Timothy W. Ryback * Literary Review * A beautifully written, beautifully composed investigation into her [Saunders's] father's origins, and also the idea of a border. It still haunts me. -- Adam Thirwell * Times Literary Supplement, *Books of the Year* * Frances Stonor Saunders has almost single-handedly started off a branch of sub-history... An extraordinarily good book, and I recommend it to anyone. -- Ian McEwan * BBC Radio 4 (WHO PAID THE PIPER?) * A completely fascinating and disturbing story written with consummate elegance and unsettling power. A forgotten corner of twentieth-century history brilliantly revealed to us. -- William Boyd * (THE WOMAN WHO SHOT MUSSOLINI) *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Vintage Publishing
Target group
College/higher education
Professional and scholarly
Dimensions
Height: 230 mm
Width: 150 mm
Thickness: 25 mm
Weight
455 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-78733-054-2 (9781787330542)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Frances Stonor Saunders is a writer, broadcaster and documentary-maker. She writes for the London Review of Books and Guardian, and is the former Arts Editor of the New Statesman. Her first book, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War, has been translated into twenty languages, and was awarded the Royal Historical Society's William Gladstone Memorial Prize. She is also the author of Hawkwood and The Woman Who Shot Mussolini. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and lives in London.