R.K. Narayan's "My Dateless Diary"

[brainwane]

If you can get ahold of this idiosyncratic little memoir, it's pretty fun and light.

R.K. Narayan was a South Indian author, mostly of fiction, during the twentieth century. One year, in the 1950s, he travelled around the US (thanks to a Ford Foundation grant), and got two books out of it. One is The Guide, a novel about a tour guide. The other is My Dateless Diary, his diary of his travels from New York through Chicago, Berkeley, Hollywood, the Grand Canyon, and more.

He has a ton of wry observations about different bits of the US, comparisons to stuff back home in Mysore, conversations with celebrities (Greta Garbo and Aldous Huxley, for example), sitcom-esque misunderstandings, poignant conversations with strangers, etc. He runs into discrimination on a bus in the South, he has trouble finding vegetarian food, people keep asking him for spiritual advice and for his opinion of Nehru. And he drafts his book along the way and submits it to his publisher. He has fun, he runs into some worries and difficult situations but nothing ever goes deeply wrong, and his descriptions of various scrapes and angsts reminds me of Wodehouse.