A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian by Marina Lewycka: book review

A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian (2005) is set in England from 1996 to the 2000s.

Nikolai Mayevskyj is an 84-year-old Ukrainian who has lived in England since 1946 – 50 years. His wife Ludmilla has been dead for two years. He now wants to marry a 36-year-old Ukrainian woman, Valentina, with a 14-year-old son, Stanislav, whom he has known for only three months. She doesn’t speak English, but she looks like Botticelli’s Venus.

Nikolai begins researching tractors in Ukraine to ‘write his great work.’

Nikolai has two daughters – 57-year-old Vera with two children and 47-year-old Nadezhda with one child. The sisters have been feuding for years. Nadezhda is the author of the story. She has found out that her father wants to marry a gold-digger who would stop at nothing for Western wealth. Nadezhda wants to stop the marriage. Ending their feud, the sisters try everything to dissuade their father from marrying Valentina, everything from ringing the Home Office to tell them that Valentina is on a tourist visa and is working illegally in England, to ringing the British Embassy in Kiev. They have four weeks to stop the marriage.

When the marriage occurs – in Vera’s and Nadezhda’s absence – Valentina’s first demand is for a car, but not any car, for only a Mercedes or Jaguar will do. She gets a Land Rover. The sisters seek an annullment or divorce, or something – anything! Valentina just has to go!

But then the unthinkable happens – Valentina is pregnant.

Interwoven between this family crisis are extracts from their father’s tractor research, the history of Ukraine, the personal history of their father and mother (and how they met), and the quest to maintain a remembrance of their mother.

The dialogue-based writing enables readers to visualize the sisters’ panic, arguments, sarcasm, and persuasion as if in a drama production. This book is light, fast-paced and entertaining. It is an easy read, written with a great deal of wit and humour.

MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of:- The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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