My Dateless Diary

R. K. Narayan was fifty when he left India for the first time, and the place he went was America. My Dateless Diary is his record of that trip, kept in the form of a travel journal. He moves from the noise and restless pace of New York to the easy friendliness of the West Coast, passes through the prosperous and inward-looking Mid-West, and ends up standing before the vastness of the Grand Canyon.

Along the way he meets a long line of people, some famous and some not. Greta Garbo, Aldous Huxley, Martha Graham, Cartier Bresson, Milton Singer, Edward G. Robinson and Ravi Shankar all appear. So does a business magnate on a train, who lost interest in Narayan the moment he learned the writer had no connection to India's steel industry.

Narayan also turns his dry humour on the smaller details of daily American life. Muggers, fast food restaurants, instant gurus, subway commuters, television advertisements and American football all get a brief, amused look. The result is a travelogue seen through the eyes of a gifted novelist who is curious, observant and rarely fooled.