A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian

Product Information

What do you think Valentina's real motives are? Does she really want the best possible life for her son, is she simply after money, or does course it was a situation that I had come across in my work on elder care, not just old men falling for unscrupulous young women, but also old These events do, however, get her talking with her sister, Vera, again, after a dispute over their inheritance from their mother had widened an already large rift seemingly beyond repair.

I know now that I was wrong. This is a well-written, very funny story about a sad situation and some serious concepts. Two years after my mother died, my father fell in love with a glamorous blonde Ukranian divorcee. He was eighty-four and she was That's what he is writing, a short history of tractors. In Ukrainian. Eighty-four years old, an engineer, a chess player and a father of two daughters, he had been recently widowed. Now he decides to marry a 36-year-old blonde Ukrainian divorcee with a teenage son and a pair of superior breasts. He knows that she wants to marry him only for his money and so that she and her son can make permanent their stay in England (where he and his family had migrated a long time ago) but he looks at her golden hair, charming eyes, curves and jiggling breasts and say "so what?" His two grownup daughters, born ten years apart, and have been feuding ever since, have temporarily united against this common enemy aptly named Valentina. listening to people who talk like this or did this voice come naturally to you? Do you have favorite phrases, or ones that you yourself use in your Her name is Valentina. To get a British passport, she is prepared to marry an elderly man, Nikolai, for whom she has no affection. The marriage would also provide the opportunity of "oxfordcambridge education" for her teenage son, who has come with her to the UK. For Nikolai's part, this union inspires the return of sexual fantasies that are quite at odds with his physical capabilities.But Pappa, have you really thought this through? It seems very sudden. I mean, she must be a lot younger than you." After the war, the Mayevskijs immigrated, and a year later, in 1946, Nadia was born. Never having known the terrors of wartime, she hasn’t had the context in which to understand or empathize with her family members. Her mother kept a garden not for aesthetics but as an emergency source of food. Vera isn’t materialistic – she just never got over the sense that material comforts could be ripped away at a moment’s notice. Her father’s obsession with technology isn’t eccentric – it’s his connection to a youth spent doing productive and uncompromised intellectual work. And his marriage isn’t just a quirk of elderly lust – he genuinely wants to help little Stanislav, to give opportunities to a boy who reminded him of himself. A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian made the Booker longlist for 2005, which is quite a feat for a debut novel - and one of the two reasons why I chose to read it. The other one is, of course, its quirky title - I just couldn't pass a book titled like that, even though I profess absolutely no knowledge of even the most rudimentary Ukrainian. My knowledge of tractors is not much better - I'm able to identify one when I see it, but that's pretty much it.

Nikolai, a former engineer who emigrated to Britain in the aftermath of the Second World War, is writing a history of tractors in Ukrainian, translated extracts from which appear throughout the novel. In the process of sorting out Nikolai's marital entanglements, Nadezhda also uncovers secrets from her family's history and learns about their experiences during the Ukrainian famine and Stalin's purges. Nadia’s vibrant voice, knowing, self-deprecating and witty, acts as both guide and interpreter for her complicated and sometimes outrageous family. In the end, A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian is her story, as she learns to redefine her role in a new family, one that must reconcile the loss of her mother with the new hopes and desires of her compromised father. Though all the characters at times yield to their worst impulses, their charm is that they struggle through as we all do: eager and resentful, yearning and unyielding, loving and infuriated in equal measure. Nadia in particular comes to terms with a history both personal and global, in a brilliant first novel that bears witness to the human struggle for dignity even as undertaken by the most undignified of people. the loss of her mother with the new hopes and desires of her compromised father. Though all the characters at times yield to their worst impulses,Actually, some of the expressions which sound outrageous and ridiculous in English are just literal translations of what people would say in Ukrainian. It wasn't until a whole year later, when the book was well on its way to publication, that I found three mysterious letters in Cyrillic script in my Captures the peculiar flavour of Eastern European immigrant life . . . a very rich mixture indeed' Daily Express

Valentina is by no means lazy. She works very hard every day, illegally of course, in an old people's home, and she spends most of her nights with another Englishman. Thus we have a picture of an assiduous but utterly evil woman. The only people capable of opposing this evil are two other women who have Ukrainian blood in their veins: Nikolai's daughters, who have long since become law-abiding British citizens. Despite the best efforts of the two sisters, their father marries the young blonde. Two sisters have to save their octogenarian father, with an extremely stubborn streak, from getting married to a thirty-five year old gold digger after his wife's death two years before. The two sisters do not have a good relationship due to the family history that was not shared between them. One was a war baby and the other a peace baby with a world of untold horror lying between them. But as they start to work together as a team, the healing and understanding comes and the family can find love and support within their own small circle again. Despite the dark memories and family feud raging between the sisters, it was still a warmhearted story. There were moments in the book that I simply allowed the tears to silently run down my face. But by the end, I smiled and wished the book did not end. There is a wonderful use of hybrid language in the book, dialogue that is a combination of Ukrainian and English. Did you spend some time the first time of the wartime events that contributed to the very different worldviews she and her sister hold, finally realizing the privilege which were quite poor. But like many immigrants, my parents believed that hard work and education were the keys to success in our new world. I amNadia is a sociologist, while her sister Vera is more of a socialite, and they haven’t spoken to each other since their mother died. Now, brought together by their father’s apparent second adolescence, they conspire to oust the newcomer and preserve the sanctity of their mother’s home and garden. Along the way the two sisters confront differences that shadowed them have throughout their childhoods and Nadia learns for the first time of the wartime events that contributed to the very different worldviews she and her sister hold, finally realizing the privilege she has enjoyed as her parents’“precious peacetime baby.” unbridled dottiness. Each of the characters indulges in uninhibited bad behaviour - and bad language - and that's what I most enjoyed writing about. So a comedy less of errors than of ugliness unfolds: Valentina marries the old coot, but has rather different expectations of Western life than he can provide for. A technical manual? A memoir? What does Nadia learn from reading this book, aside from facts about tractors? Consider also how it functions