Marina Lewycka: "A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian."

The book's eco-friendly Penguin cover advertises it as longlisted for the Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Orange Prize in 2005. (The Orange Prize is granted to a novel that is written: a) in English b) by a woman of any age or nationality, plus, c) the novel must be published in the U.K. The Orange Prize went then to Lionel Shriver for We Need to talk about Kevin (coming soon). This year's winner is Joanna Kavenna's Inglorious - something to look forward to reading.) 

A Short History of Tractors... won a prize for comic fiction, which is aptly confirmed by the adjectives used to sell the book to potential readers: uproariously funny, hugely enjoyable, mad and hilarious. Indeed, the topic of Ukrainian immigrants in England combined with an old man's fascination with a young sexy gastarbeiter provides wonderful occasions for comedy.  My experience as a reader, however, has taught me that with the glorious exception of Chaucer's "Miller's Tale", an affair between an older man (here: eighty-four years) and a much younger woman (thirty-six here) does not necessarily turn into a scathing tract on the cuckold figure or a case study of the woman's gerontophilia verging on necrophilia - this would undoubtedly happen if the genders were reversed - but is usually interpreted as a very serious study of human (read: man's) aging (for example Coetzee) or a universal (read: man's) contemplation of beauty necessarily associated with a young woman, preferably still a girl (like that in Marquez). It might even be concluded that it is Nabokov's pedophiliac Humbert Humbert who appears to be pathetic and ridiculous enough to compare to Lewycka's character of Mr Majevskyj. Reading this book was then a refreshing experience since it provided a change from the canonical vision of an old-man-young-woman marriage as much as it was reassuring: someone does find the geezer as preposterous as I would. Or is it so only because the writer is a woman?

On the other hand, for example, "Metro" characterized the book as unexpectedly moving, whereas someone called it touching. Although the book is first of all funny both in its story line and in the portrayal of its characters (take for example the following statement: This is the defect of character which is typical, by the way, of the Russian psyche, in which there is always a tendency to believe in violence as first rather than the last resort.), Lewycka's narrative illustrates the old truth that the only difference between tragedy and comedy seems to be the ending. Under the humorous portraiture of Ukrainian newcomers the book contains a much murkier history: a story of human fear and tragedy in the face of Stalin's policy of genocide in Ukraine - the Great Famine of the 1930s. Lewycka juxtaposes two waves of Ukrainian immigrants: those of the parents (survivors of the Famine, Mr Majevskyj and his wife), who seem to be more positively portrayed although are capable of irritating the reader, and those who leave capitalist Ukraine and come to Britain to realize their (I should say American) Dream (glamorous Nadezhda), who seem to be irritating but are finally redeemed. 

A great read - both entertaining and enlightening. And definitely moving.