

Loading... A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian (2005)by Marina Lewycka
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» 17 more Booker Prize (88) Books Read in 2018 (64) Books Read in 2019 (148) Female Author (255) Amusing Book Titles (46) Books Read in 2016 (2,258) BBC Radio 4 Bookclub (93) A Novel Cure (280) First Novels (41) KayStJ's to-read list (329) Best family sagas (185) Books Read in 2017 (3,603) No current Talk conversations about this book. This is a tender and funny story.A great read. This book was short-listed for the Orange Prize, and long-listed for the Booker in 2005. It's a fun, comic novel. Our narrator, Nadezhda's father, a Ukrainian immigrant in England, meets and marries a much younger Ukrainian woman, who appears to be a floozy and a gold digger. Nadezhda and her sister Vera are barely speaking, but they join forces to protect their father. The book story is told with lots of humor, but I also learned a lot about the Ukraine and Russia, and also tractors. I really adored this book and found it difficult to put down. She did a remarkable job with capturing the Ukrainian voice, not just in dialogue but in capturing the essence of humor, values, and trauma from World War II. The architecture of the story is really minimal, yet complex. It is told in pieces across various conversations and memories. Some chapters are just conversations, the story playing out in conversations about the action. I laughed out loud and was moved to tears over and over again. The relationship between the sisters was especially poignant-both having experienced trauma, but the older one actually remembering it, and the rift that causes between them. Just splendidly done. Quirky, touching and thoroughly enjoyable. So many moments where I related it back to my own family and their "strange" habits. Must be a Ukrainian thing. I bought A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian from a charity shop because the title made me smile. It’s an easy to read story with humorous characters who exhibit a down to earth display of real people. The story is unpredictable, with twists and turns that keep you gripped to the next page. I read it in a single day sat on the train. The writing style is easy to follow, the only places I skipped ahead were the non-fiction parts about tractors littered throughout the story. I enjoyed how the multiple storylines mingled together giving depth to each of the characters individually. The context of the story was educational and eye opening for me, whilst still being familiar and believable. The story came across as well planned, each part added to the plot and the development of the characters whilst keeping a relaxed, enjoyable pace. Light-hearted, humorous book well worth a read.
This is an odd one. Two years after the death of her mother, Nadezhda Lewis’s father, Nikolai Mayevskyj, a British resident and 1945 refugee from Ukraine, takes up with Valentina, a much more recent - and much younger - Ukrainian with a young son. The book recounts the unfolding of this relationship, through marriage and subsequent divorce proceedings and the reconciliation it brings about between Nadezhda and her older sister, Vera, who had become estranged following shenanigans involving their mother’s will. Nikolai is also writing the eponymous “Short History Of Tractors In Ukrainian” extracts from which are doled out throughout the book. This is all treated in a knockabout style and the characters are well delineated. In contrast to the humorous aspects there is also Mayevskyj family backstory from Ukraine which is much more sombre. Nikolai and his wife lived through Stalin’s farm collectivisations (and famines) of the 1920s and 30s plus the German invasion of World War 2. The main thrust of the novel, though, is really about Nadezhda’s lack of intimate knowledge of this past and Vera’s insistence that things belong there, not to be dredged up. Some infelicities: the marriage takes place in a Catholic church even though Valentina is divorced (but the priest may not know) and Peterborough (United) are playing at home but appear on the big screen on a pub TV. This latter is unlikely I would think - even if they did reach the Championship. Lewycka makes great play of the traumatic past of the Majevskyj family but to my mind there was a whiff of “something nasty in the woodshed” about her treatment of it. A Short History Of Tractors In Ukrainian is entertaining but ultimately strives for more than it delivers. The younger sister, Nadezhda, reminisces about Ukraine and ponders the country's history. She dwells on well-known tragic events: the famine, Nazi occupation, Stalin's purges, Babi Yar. The hard realism of these images is in stark contrast with the grotesque main plot. Reading this novel gave me the impression that I had read a school textbook on Ukrainian history with one eye on an episode of Coronation Street. More than just a jovial farce about assimilation, A Short History Of Tractors in Ukrainian is spliced with family anecdotes and memories of the motherland. Nadezhda remembers her mother's salty vegetable soup and her father's prize-winning eulogy to a hydro-electric power station. More significantly, elder sister Vera comes clean about the family's wartime past, including time spent in a German labour camp. Despite Lewycka's robust writing, the will-she-won't-she-stay element of Valentina's story is hard to sustain. The family ends up in court, but the outcome is predictable. Predictable and sometimes repetitive hilarity ensues. But then Lewycka's comic narrative changes tone. Nadezhda, who has never known much about her parents' history, pieces it together with her sister and learns that there is more to her cartoonish father than she once believed. "I had thought this story was going to be a knockabout farce, but now I see it is developing into a knockabout tragedy," Nadezhda says at one point, and though she is referring to Valentina, she might also be describing this unusual and poignant novel. Belongs to Publisher SeriesLa Campana (271) La Campana Tocs (57) dtv premium (24557) Penguin Celebrations (32)
For years, Nadezhda and Vera have had as little as possible to do with each other. But now they find they'd better learn how to get along, because since their mother's death their ageing father has been sliding into his second childhood, and an alarming new woman has just entered his life. No library descriptions found.
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