So you’d like your child to be a successful writer (as the classified ads might say)? Well, the least you can do, in that case, is to ensure that he or she grows up as a first- or second-generation immigrant. That way, you will provide them with an incomparably rich (literarily speaking) background straddled between two cultures, with all the sense of irony, alienation and identity crisis this entails. They will absorb two different languages and, even better, the mish-mash of both which inevitably ends up being spoken at home and which has enlivened Anglophone literature in a hundred different ways over the past half century. And, as you will probably have been thoughtful enough to provide them with some fairly alarming experience of flight, or at least some tragic family secrets, they will approach their subject — as Marina Lewycka does in this delightful first novel — with an understanding of history, a profundity, and yet a lightness of touch, that are a joy.
Despite its title, A Short History of Tractors in Ukraine is at heart a romance: the story of the hilarious, savage and even occasionally tender love between Nikolai, an octogenarian and rather smelly tractor expert, and Valentina, an avaricious 36-year-old blonde from Kiev.
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