And while the litterati may not approve of her writing style, Lewycka makes this story accessible to anyone willing to read it. This novel is a sharp and comical piece of work, utilising clashes between different cultures and generations as fodder to make you laugh. As soon as war broke out in 1941, Nikolai was drafted into the Soviet Army where his engineering training was put to use developing tractors, airplanes, tanks, and other machinery. Having been born in different places in different times (the older Vera born in the Ukraine before the family emigrated to escape the crushing Soviets the younger Nadezhda born in the relative peace of England), the two sisters fight over what the history of their family means, as well as over what course it should take. Vera was born in 1937, just after the Ukrainian famine of the early 1930s and during Stalin’s mass-murder purges of anyone deemed less than ideologically pure. Yet when one side is biased in a particular way, the perception and course of history can change.
As their father highlights in his short history of tractors (in Ukranian), history can be fairly simple in hindsight when one views matters objectively. Nevertheless, from a seemingly simple plot and an unusually casual writing style, Lewycka deals with more than simple family issues - the battle between the sisters is more than just the usual sibling rivalry. To stop this union, the two sisters must put aside past quarrels and save their father.
Winner of the Bollinger Everyman Prize for Comic Fiction in 2005, and shortlisted for the Orange Prize in the same year (only to lose to Lionel Shriver's We Need to Talk About Kevin), Lewycka tackles a subject that every son and daughter fears - Vera and Nadezhda's eighty-four year old father wants to marry a gold-digging, blonde Ukrainian divorcee aged thirty-six. For Marina Lewycka's first effort, A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian definitely hits the spot.
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