Author(s): Susan Harlan (Wake Forest University, USA)

Society | Read our reviews!

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. You can't think about travel without thinking about luggage. And baggage has baggage. Susan Harlan takes readers on a journey with the suitcases that support, accessorize, and accompany our lives. Along the way, she shows how the materials of travel - the carry-ons, totes, trunks, and train cases of the past and present - have stories to tell about displacement, home, gender, class, consumption, and labor. Luggage considers bags as carefully curated microcosms of our domestic and professional selves, charting the evolution of travel across literature, film, and art. A simple suitcase, it turns out, contains more than you might think. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

----------------------------------

If you have a fascination for watching the bags on the carousel at the airport and wondering what is inside each and which belongs to whom, then you will find Susan Harlan’s Luggage a delight to read. Harlan, an English Literature associate professor at Wake Forest University, splices her accounts of travel, luggage and packing with cultural references from literature and film (the bizarre and poignant) to discuss our relationship with suitcases, bags, carry-alls, carry-ons, etc. Consider Jane Austen’s woes about the whereabouts of her trunk; Orhan Pamuk’s encounter with his father’s suitcase (filled with notebooks of writing), which reveals his father’s other self and of which they never spoke, revealing the schism between father and son; and Katherine Mansfield’s likening of humans to portmanteaux. Mary Poppins makes an appearance with her mysterious and infinitely producing carpet-bag from which anything one desires can emerge, while Anne of Green Gables’ similar-style bag (almost as physically empty) holds all in the world she owns. Harlan discusses what luggage is: does it include baggage, and at what stage do bags fall outside luggage or cargo? She looks at the origins of the various words that describe objects we pitch together and haul with us. Intriguing, thoughtful and littered with facts, Harlan's book looks at luggage through a variety of lenses. In the chapter 'Packing', she explores the industry - the numerous magazine articles, the books, the self-help videos - that will aid you to be or become the perfect packer. In 'My Luggage', she reveals her penchant for collecting bags and her love of vintage luggage. Her description of the clasps and the linings will make you look at your own suitcases with her observer’s eye, and may have you scouring the op shops for that special something. Finding a painting (now framed and hanging on her wall) in one suitcase, complete with a baggage label with name and address, gives her a piece of someone else’s history. Harlan looks at the meaning of luggage and historical happenings - what is left behind after disasters, what is abandoned, what can’t be taken, and what little might come with you when you are travelling unexpectedly - the absence of luggage when crisis impels people to flee with a perhaps only a cell phone and what they up stand in. Harlan takes a journey to Alabama to visit the Unclaimed Baggage Centre (a tourist attraction) - the place where all unclaimed lost luggage in America finally rests (ironically, the building neighbours a cemetery) and is sorted to saleable, good-enough-for-charity, or trashed. The lost luggage is purchased by the UBC sight-unseen, and bags are opened at 2:30 pm every day - 7000 new items daily. The bizarre and curious are kept in 'the museum', while the rest is sent to the appropriate department for display and sale. Only three laptops per visitors please - and lines of wedding dresses five deep make you wonder why these bags (0.5%) were never claimed from Lost Luggage departments of hotels, airports and bus stations. Harlan explores the meaning of objects that reside in our luggage, the physical objects and the weight these carry, but also those invisible burdens - our baggage. Neatly interspersed between the chapters is Harlan's account of her road journey with her orange suitcase and her dog cross-state to a Shakespeare conference - four days on the road and four at the hotel - what she packs, uses and returns with.Luggage is part of the 'Object Lessons' series from Bloomsbury. These are intelligent, amusing and thought-provoking long-form essays about the hidden lives of everyday things. Highly recommended.

{STELLA}