Prawda

In the autumn of 2015, the novelist Felicitas Hoppe, accompanied by German-based Russian sculptor Alexej Meschtschanow, photographer Jana Müller and the Viennese-American Professor Ulrike Rainer of Dartmouth College, set out on a road-trip across America sponsored by the Goethe-Institut and Villa Aurora. The trip was part lecture-tour, part art-project, and part a virtual collaboration with the famous Russian comic writers Ilf and Petrov, who made a similar road-trip - sponsored by Pravda - in 1935. The group's blog http://www.3668ilfpetrow.com/ documents the two trips in parallel, illustrated inter alia by Jana Müller's photographs of Ilf and Petrov's book in a succession of American motel rooms. It concludes with an impressively show more detailed account of miles covered, gallons of petrol, water and coffee consumed, packs of cigarettes smoked, and pillows slept on.

But Hoppe is someone who likes to mess with our expectations of form and genre, so the novel she put together out of the journey is nothing as straightforward as a conventional travel book. As we see from the start, when we're introduced not to the four real travellers of the blog, but to four fictional characters who seem to share their outward characteristics, but not their names. And more so when we realise that this is much more a journey through the America of the (outsider's) imagination than any kind of real-world road-trip. Hoppe hardly bothers to describe anything she sees out of the car window, and during their stops we hear little about the towns, museums and famous sights, much more about the process of getting to them and the people met along the way. Strangers who happen to catch her eye, like a waitress who served them in a Detroit diner or a hotel commissionaire in Chicago, are built up imaginatively into major characters who pop up repeatedly in the book and comment on the subsequent action. We also notice that some of the stages of the journey don't entirely fit into our idea of a realistic travel narrative - there's the very best literary authority for being picked up by a tornado and whirled to a place where the normal rules don't apply, of course, but it's not the sort of thing that ever happened to de Tocqueville or to Fanny Trollope. Suffice it to say that besides Ilf and Petrov, there are Karl May, Mark Twain, The Wizard of Oz, Dr Seuss and The Simpsons all playing a big part in this trip, as does a graphic artist called Brueghel-the-very-youngest, not to mention a host of other more transitory cultural references.

Although it's a two-way trip from East to West coast and back again, the journey seems to run out of steam after a visit to a New Orleans graveyard - like the one in Easy Rider! - and we don't hear much of the West-to-East trip apart from an (imaginary) Thanksgiving dinner with the Obamas.

I'm not sure quite where this trip took us, in anything other than a narrowly geographic sense, but it is very entertaining to go along with Hoppe's irrepressible leaps of the imagination. Not that I would have wanted to be in that car in real life, fascinating though the conversation must have been: it would have been a truly hellish trip for a non-smoker. show less