Why read In Search of Melancholy Baby?

Book cover of In Search of Melancholy Baby

Book description

The Russian author offers an affectionate chronicle of life in the United States, with discussions of such topics as the European charm of Washington, D.C., and the American immigration bureaucracy

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1 author picked In Search of Melancholy Baby as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Lisa A. Kirschenbaum

Author

In 1980, the novelist Vassily Aksyonov, whose hipster characters loved rock’n’roll and all things American, fell afoul of the Soviet state; stripped of his Soviet citizenship while in the United States, he decided to stay.

His memoir chronicles his efforts to make sense of a country that often failed to match his idealized preconceptions. Like Ilf and Petrov, whose travelogue was one of his points of reference, Aksyonov undertook a road trip from New York to California and back.

He was sometimes overawed by American technology, critical of American cultural vacuity, and able to laugh at his own disorientation. His…

From Lisa's list on The best books about why Russians and Americans misunderstand one another.