A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian
by Marina Lewycka
Published by Penguin
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Reviewed by Karen Morse
"Two years after my mother died, my father fell in love with a glamorous blond Ukrainian divorcee. He was eight-four and she was thirty-six. She exploded into our lives life a fluffy pink grenade, churning up the murky water, bringing to the surface a sludge of sloughed-off memories, giving the family ghosts a kick up the backside."
When you hear that a book was nominated for the Man Booker Prize and short-listed for the Orange Prize, you expect a work of serious fiction; but when you read a book with a first paragraph like the one above, you know you're in for a treat.
Marina Lewycka's debut novel is amazingly sophisticated. Filled with a cast of full-bodied characters, A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian is about family struggles as banal as sibling rivalries and as serious as surviving forced labor camps in Eastern Europe. Clearly informed by her work in elder care, one of the novel's themes is the challenge of aging respectfully.
The star of the novel is eccentric eighty-four year old Ukranian emigre Nikolai Mayevskyj. His middle-aged daughters, Vera and Nadia, are in the middle of a long-time feud made all the worse by the death of their mother and the settling of her estate. All that changes when their father announces his intention to remarry. The woman in question is young enough to be his granddaughter and is still married to man in Ukraine. The sisters must put aside their grudges and work together to help their father maintain himself when the marriage--and his life--spin out of control.
While the novel is laugh-out-loud funny, Lewycka uses humor to deal with many serious issues. For example, much of the conflict in the novel has less to do with personality and more to do with disparate socio-cultural environments in which the characters were raised.
Armchair Interviews says: In A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, Marina Lewycka has created a complex, but eminently readable novel.