A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian by Marina Lewycka

A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian is the debut novel from British novelist of Ukrainian origin Marina Lewycka. In this novel, we follow the tempestuous relationships of two feuding sisters and their recently widowed father who almost immediately marries a Ukrainian immigrant after the death of his wife.

This is reputedly a funny book - just look at those quotes on the cover calling it "extremely funny" and "mad and hilarious." I mostly found it really sad. The family is falling apart without its matriarch's leadership, the aging father is at loose ends and is becoming physically less and less capable. Even the abusive new wife is a figure of complexity - you really feel for her as she is desperate to give her teenage son a new, better life in a country so far away from their own.  Interwoven among all this is the history of a refugee family and the damage that war and conflict can do.  

Sure, there are some lighthearted moments of dialogue and some visuals that sounded funny, but taken as a whole the novel is melancholy and sad. As I get older and my own mother gets older, I don't want to read about elder abuse, I don't want to read about folks going to assisted living and giving up their cherished pets, and I really don't want to read about intergenerational trauma that follows rape and comes back to haunt people in their old age. 

I think it's a well-written book, I think I'd probably read more of this author if I stumbled upon something, and I think many people might enjoy it. But the content of this one just missed the mark for me.

Lines of note:

I ran away to live at Cathy's house. They lived in a long, low Cotswold stone cottage at White Oak Green, full of books and cats and cobwebs. Cathy's parents were left-wing intellectuals. They didn't mind Cathy going on marches; in fact they encouraged her. They talked about grown-up things like whether Britain should join the EEC and who created God. But the house was cold, and the food tasted funny, and the cats jumped on you in the night. (page 158)

No matter how comfortable your hosts may try to make it, it's crazy how when you spend the night at someone else's house, the strangeness of your environment just means you're not going to sleep very well and you're going to wake up groggy in the morning. 

He was a reluctant soldier. They had shoved a bayonet into his hands and told him he had to fight for the motherland, but he didn't want to fight - not for the motherland, not for the Soviet state, not for anybody. He wanted to sit at his desk with his slide rule and his sheets of blank paper and puzzle over the drag-life equation. (page 214)

This paralleled a line I noted in Great House and I just thought it was an interesting comparison in the two books.