Brace yourselves for a long review, goodreads friends. I have feelings.

The feelings are basically this: Ilf and Petrov, ILU. While I enjoyed the two novels they co-wrote, this book is something very different and very special. It's a travelogue of a 10,000-mile automobile journey that these two Soviet writers took across America in 1935.

Their observations about life in America are often striking and precise. I feel like Ilf and Petrov's great talent is the ability to see through to the essence of something, distill it, and then communicate it to others. They are warm and clever, and this book made me love them in a personal way.

The best part of the book for me was the time they spent in New York and their complicated embrace of the city. This is from when they visit an automat here:

Behind the glass stands a dour sandwich or a glass of juice or a piece of pie. Despite the shining glass and metal, the sausages and cutlets deprived of liberty somehow produce a strange impression. One pities them, like cats at a show. A man drops a nickel, acquires the right to open the little door, takes out his sandwich, carries it to his table and there eats it, again putting his hat under his chair on the special shelf. Then the man goes up to a faucet, drops his “nickel,” and out of the faucet into the glass drips exactly as much coffee and milk as is supposed to drip. One feels something humiliating, something insulting to man in that. One begins to suspect that the owner of the automat has outfitted his establishment, not in order to present society with a pleasant surprise, but in order to discharge from service poor marcelled girls with pink headdresses and thereby earn a few more dollars.

In fact, many of my favorite passages deal with their experiences of food here. Another favorite:

Persistent advertising has taught Americans to drink juices before breakfast and lunch. In the juices are vitamins which are presumably beneficial to the customers, while the sale of juices is indubitably of benefit to fruit merchants. We soon succumbed to this American custom. At first we drank the thick yellow orange juice. Then we passed to the translucent green juice of the grapefruit. Then before eating we began to take the grapefruit itself (it is covered with sugar and is eaten with a spoon; its taste reminds one somewhat of the taste of an orange with a dash of lemon in it, although it is juicier than both these fruits). Finally, with some trepidation and not all at once, we began to imbibe the mundane tomato juice, peppering it a bit beforehand. That proved to be the tastiest of all and the most refreshing, and it best suited our South Russian stomachs.

Of course, juice is not the only beverage that comes in for judgment: there is whisky, with its "disgustingly drug-storish stench," and Japanese tea, also known as "fragrant green hot water." And don't get them started on the advertising for Coca-Cola.

Then there is a hilarious episode where they go to a Mexican restaurant, compare the enchiladas to blintzes, and leave the restaurant hungry and angry because the food was so spicy.

The book is fairly long, and you can probably get the flavor of it without reading through to the end. It's obvious that they got incredibly sick of America during the trip--or as they put it at one point, "we had skimmed the cream off the journey."

There's so much I haven't even touched on, like Mr. and Mrs. Adams and the saga of Mr. Adams's hat...but I'll let you discover the rest of it for yourselves. ( )

Very vividly observed and only occasionally propagandistic ( )