The object of his affection is Valentina, an illegal immigrant from Ukraine whose main appeal appears to be her youth (she is thirty-six years old), her dyed-blonde hair, and her enormous, voluptuous breasts. He holds seventeen technological patents and now spends his days writing the quasi-academic tract that gives the novel its title (every now and again excerpts from it interrupt the novel proper).Īs the novel opens, eighty-four-year-old Nikolai tells his daughters that he has fallen in love and is going to get married. Nadia’s father, Nikolai, is a retired engineer whose chauvinism has driven away both daughters, and who laments his intellectual glory days. Two years ago, after the funeral, Nadia and her much older sister, Vera, stopped speaking after an argument about the will – an argument that, in Nadia’s telling, hinged on Vera’s unbridled materialism. Nadia’s family has never been very happy – especially since the death of her mother, a calming presence who had been a peacemaker.
The narrator, forty-seven-year-old Nadezhda (Nadia for short) Mayevskij is a university lecturer in sociology in Peterborough, a small city east of London in England. The novel was critically acclaimed upon publication, eventually being shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. However, under this mostly lighthearted veneer, the novel traces the roots of the sisters’ enmity, and with them, the ways in which the family suffered under the Communist regime from which they managed to flee. Author Marina Lewycka uses her own heritage to tell the story of two Ukrainian-English sisters who must put aside their own differences in order to extricate their octogenarian father from a marriage to a much younger gold-digger. The novel A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian (2005) hides a darkly poignant story of family dysfunction under a veneer of comic farce.
0 kommentar(er)
