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

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Part tragedy, part comedy, the story present the typical life of people who plastered a smile on their faces during the day and relived the horror of the war in their nocturnal dreams. What was more difficult was fitting it into the sociopolitical framework, which I think is quite interesting. They hand over the reins of common sense to their offspring, who are often ill-prepared and disinclined to suddenly start behaving like adults, and decide to have one last burst of youth, a second adolescence. What would you do if you had a parent or family member who seemed to be entering into such a flawed allegiance? But like many immigrants, my parents believed that hard work and education were the keys to success in our new world.

Of course, Valentina's dialect is quite amusing but completely unrealistic from a linguistical point of view (if you don't understand the most basic English grammar, you won't know words like 'shrivel'). The other no-no that the author does is to somehow allow her lead first-person narrator to know what someone else is thinking. I also felt that the narrator’s character remained something of a mystery to me, despite her revealing her family’s secrets she didn’t really share too much of her own feelings.

The book is also about families, old age, tenderness, love, the ties that bind even when we don’t want them too. Did you spend some time listening to people who talk like this or did this voice come naturally to you?

This is the story of old Nikolai Mayevskyj (pronounced "Mayevski"), eccentric immigrant engineer from Ukraine who falls in love at the age of eighty-four with a sex-bomb, Valentina, who is thirty-six. It makes you realize how complicated we are - how we can be brilliant in some areas of our lives and then complete idiots in others, without even noticing it, much to the detriment of our loved ones.What follows is a whimsical sequence of events as Nadezhda and Vera try to prevent their father from marrying Valentina, combined revelations about their own family, pieces from the long and troubled history of Ukraine, and their father's life work - the grand history of the Ukrainian tractor. In fact, the book was so entertaining that I (an elitist) felt guilty because I assumed that it's the kind of novel anyone would love.

One of the main points of contrast between Nadia and Vera’s mother and Valentina is their differing approaches to cooking and housekeeping. Now he decides to marry a 36-year-old blonde Ukrainian divorcee with a teenage son and a pair of It's a straightforward narrative,it sustains our aquaintance with convincing characters, contains warmth, quirkiness and interest in something unfamiliar - if you're not familiar with Ukraine, which I'm not. The execution is equally lazy - the style is tedious, it's as if Lewycka used up all her creativity on inventing the pidgin English Valentina, the gold digger, speaks in.Considering this was a first attempt it was pretty good, but i'd expect a big improvement in a second novel.

In a nutshell, it is a story of a very dysfunctional family, hiding its true nature behind the veil of dark comedy. Though all the characters at times yield to their worst impulses, their charm is that they struggle through as we all do: eager and resentful, yearning and unyielding, loving and infuriated in equal measure.When she was twenty-one, Stalin had discovered he could use famine as a political weapon against the Ukrainian kulaks.