A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian
Marina Lewycka
Reels you in from the get-go with a tantalisingly comic set-up of stubborn, love/lust-struck 84-year-old Nikolai Mayevskyj’s impending marriage to buxomy, gold-digging thirty-something Valentina from Ukraine. His estranged daughters, Nadezhda and Vera, soon team up to prevent this from taking place. The Mayevskyjs themselves are Ukrainian, but have settled down in the UK.
Having drawn one in, one is treated as a co-conspirator by Nadezhda, whose point of view grounds the novel. We share in her reminiscences of her mother, her outrage at her father’s behaviour and her need to learn about her family’s past. What begins as a comical story develops into something much more and eventually the long shadow of the atrocities of war and history, the resilience of the human spirit and the strong bonds of family are all revealed. In between, we get treated to a discourse on yes, a short history of tractors, translated from the Ukrainian.