A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian: Marina Lewycka (Penguin Essentials, 71)

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Some reviewers mentioned how confusing this title was for them, because, you know, it says 'A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian' and yet it's not! A. One of the wonderful things about writing is that the idea you start out with is not necessarily the one that gets written.

Valentina, il nome della bomba bionda minacciosa, non si muove cauta, ma con ferrea determinazione: sposa Nikolaj, e incurante dell’arrocco figliare, usa il suo conto in banca per appropriarsi di tutti i simboli di consumo della civiltà occidentale, iniziando dai vestiti.But instead of fun with tractors I got the family squabbles, elderly abuse, well-hidden family secrets that nobody wants to unearth, the pent-up years of anger and frustration, and the misery of life. I think I may have actually not enjoyed this book because, and I am going to level with people here, I am prejudiced against Ukrainians. Because this is what 'Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian' is also about: the little people who are, essentially, and despite all the scars they might be carrying, survivors of History. There is a time in every family when the older people give up the struggle to be sensible, and to be providers, and to keep the show on the road.

Emigrato è anche il vecchio padre, Nikolaj è arrivato in Inghilterra nel 1943 (emigrata è anche l’autrice, Marina Lewycka, che è nata da genitori ucraini in un campo profughi a Kiel, in Germania, e già bambina è approdata in terra d’Albione).The main characters (both sisters, their dead mother and elderly father) are interesting and reasonably well developed, meaningful without sliding into caricature, apart perhaps from Valentina. I think it dealt with alot of serious issues, and was quite educational about the history of Ukraine and the perceptions of the west. None of the characters are particularly interesting or multifaceted: the old man is pointlessly pathetic and helpless, his daughters are too self-absorbed for us to really like them and Valentina is nothing more than a stereotypical gold-digger, and the only real attempt at presenting her culture and ethnicity in the novel is to simplify her sentence structure and have her mispronounce all the English words. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Nadezhda and her shaken family must face the ghosts of their past, confront their heritage and rediscover relationships.

Written in the first person of the Nadezhda character, the narrative is constantly interrupted by the character's explanation of things in parenthesis.However, I really like Lewytska's narrative voice, and I will definitely be on the lookout for her other works. One of the main points of contrast between Nadia and Vera’s mother and Valentina is their differing approaches to cooking and housekeeping. In a nutshell, it is a story of a very dysfunctional family, hiding its true nature behind the veil of dark comedy. I thought this must be one of those Internet scams where I would be asked to send huge sums of money to these putative relatives. A. I think all parents want to shield their children from the true nature of the adult world, especially when they have experienced the barbarities of a century like the last.