A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian Review

 Since I purchased my Kindle, I have not read too many physical copies of books. But recently I went to my local Waterstones to see if my order of ‘Yellowface’ has arrived (it has not at that point, but I have since got it, watch this space) and decided to roam around a bit. Name of Marina Lewycka sounded familiar to me and with that, an interesting book cover and the encouragement by a woman in the bookstore telling me that ‘A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian’ is one of the funniest books she has read, I ended up buying it. I did not know much about it, as I try not to spoil too much before reading it, except that it is a story about Ukrainian immigrants in the UK. I must say that perhaps my expectations were a bit high, but I found this book to be average at best.

The story is indeed about a family fleeing communist regime in the USSR to the UK. It consists of four people-mother, father and two sisters. After the mother’s passing two years prior to the events in the book, the father decides to remarry a much younger woman from Ukraine, which causes his daughters to try to prevent her from taking advantage of him. The story also follows their family history that is brutal and full of trauma, but also filled with a lot of unspoken issues. The chapters are also filled with rather technical writing by their father about the history of tractors that he is writing in Ukrainian, hence the title of the novel. 

The narration is given to the younger of two sisters, a well educated and well established professor of sociology. Given that she is younger, a lot of the family secrets are kept from her , her whole life which frustrates her. Her narration is quite obviously extremely biased and unreliable. Other characters are told only from her perspective, which I normally do not mind but here it really annoyed me as I did not enjoy this character at all. Although I understand why she would strongly dislike Valentina, her father’s Ukrainian wife, her descriptions are so unrealistic I am left wondering if she was really as bad as the narrator tells us. The writing style itself was also unoriginal and boring. I will admit that I found myself putting the book down because I struggled to focus on it.  I am also not sure what was the point of their father’s book about tractors in Ukrainian, as I felt that it did not add anything to the story in the book, albeit I have learned more than I ever thought I would about the history of tractors.

While the narrator could have been such an interesting character, as somebody between two worlds, and fighting for freedom while also having a duty to her father, she is so painfully dull that it reflects on the dullness of the book. I wish that instead of so many descriptions of random landscapes of England or the weather, we got an honest discussion about the struggles of immigrant identities. In almost every chapter, we would get background on this family that would start to explain their characters, but it was quite underdeveloped and it left me really disappointed. I must also return to the fact that the paragraphs about the tractors were also completely unnecessary and I do not see any relation to anything else in the book.

 I guess this was supposed to be a satire about the group of Ukranians living in Britain, but even from that perspective it fell flat. The characters were far too flat for that, which again could be related to the fact that the least interesting of them all was chosen for a narrator. She does make fun of literally everyone in the novel but herself and consistently places herself above them, one way or another. On one hand, we have this completely ridiculous situation of the young Ukrainian gold-digger that is supposed to be funny, but then she flat out starts abusing her old husband leaving me really confused about the tone of the book. Additionally, through flashbacks to their life in the former USSR, the story turns extremely sad and serious only to then get told about the father’s quirk so quickly it gives me whiplash.

The ending also felt quite rushed and unsatisfying. After they finally beat the big bad of the novel, which was Valentina and gave her a fair share of humiliation, her husband from Ukraine just shows up through a series of coincidences and accepts to take Valentina and her unborn baby. Oh yes, she is also pregnant now out of nowhere!  It felt like the author just realized she dragged us through pages and pages of a boring story, it needed to end somehow so she just let the husband come to England and send them back to Ukraine.

Overall, I was really disappointed with this book. I was expecting a lively, humorous novel about a group of strong, interesting people that survived. Yes, I expected difficult families, but I also expected love and care and understanding, none of which was in here. Instead, it was some 300 pages of boring stereotypes written in a dull and unoriginal style by a dull and unoriginal narrator. Instead of a deep investigation into these people’s lives, we are given a list of stereotypical characters and a story that never gets interesting or compelling.

I have rated this ⅖, as it did not feel like ⅕, but it was close. I have heard from my mother that Lewycka’s other book she has read (that is why the name sounded familiar at the first place) ‘Two Caravans’ is lots better, so I will check that one out. Did you read this book? What did you think?

source: marinalewycka.com