Book Club #2: American Road Trip
Evgenia had the great idea of reading Ilf and Petrov’s One-storied America for our next book club discussion. (Watch first book club discussion about PKD.) And I fully support her vote.
One-storied America (also known as American Road Trip) was written by two famous comic Soviet writers who spent several months traveling across America in 1935, right after the Great Depression, and their dispatches (which were first published in a Soviet newspaper) were then collected into a funny and insightful book. This was almost a century ago, but many of their observations about the American way of life still hold true today. To Evgenia, Ilf and Petrov’s view of America gives a glimpse into a now long-dead Soviet world, which actually believed in its own ideas and the righteousness of its future. Ilf and Petrov were the most popular comic writers in the Soviet Union — with Twelve Chairs being their biggest hit. Mel Brooks made it into film in 1970.
We’ll give you a month to read the book. We’ll announce the date for a livestream discussion of the book in a few weeks and the discussion itself will take place sometime in mid-August. So get to reading!
A couple of notes:
Go here for a chat thread where you can discuss the book as you go along.
There have been several translations of the book published under various titles over the years. Perhaps the nicest is this one: Ilf and Petrov's American Road Trip. It features photos they took on their road trip. Sadly it is out of print. If you have trouble getting your hands on a copy, tell us in the chat thread…and we’ll help you.
—Yasha
Want to know more?
I like this from the (Russian language) Wikipedia articleabout the book: “It repeatedly criticizes unsightly American traits, like the standardization of life, and the intellectual passivity of Americans, especially young people and their gullibility.”