Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2012
Translated by Antonina W.Bouis
Imbued with a comic nostalgia overlaid with Dovlatov’s characteristically dry wit, The Suitcase is an intensely human, delightfully ironic novel from the finest Soviet satirist to appear in English since Vladimir Voinovich.
In these stories, Dovlatov describes the contents of the suitcase he brought out of the USSR in the eighties, containing the whole of his most precious possessions-a belt, a shirt. The stories of the book remind me in a certain way of those in Primo Levi's The Periodic Table based on various chemical elements. I think they're haunting in the same way, though Levi's tone is tender and brave, assured, where Dovlatov's very Russian, contemporary voice is hilarious, self-deprecating, self-implicating, pathetic and honest as he unfolds the chaos of life in the USSR via these shabby, everyday Soviet possessions. (The Goodreads Review, Janet)