Sophie Lewis
Keeping it in the Family
A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian
By Marina Lewycka
Viking 336pp £12.99 order from our bookshop
This title deserves a second chance. My first instinct was to recoil. What could be more boring or abstruse than a history of tractors in a foreign language? This is surely the stuff of the dustiest scholarship. And then an appreciation of whimsy kicks in. There must be more to it.
There is an academic treatise on the history of tractors at the centre of the story. It snakes through the book like a backbone of fact, read out chapter by chapter as it is written, by Nikolai Mayevskyj, the narrator Nadia’s ageing and eccentric father. While she battles to save
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Wrote some nice things and some less nice things about Edward St Aubyn for @Lit_Review. Something for everyone https://literaryreview.co.uk/sociable-scientists
'Heaven for him was being caressed by duchesses in gilded salons and entertaining royalty in his palatial mansion ... where he showed off his gemmed gewgaws and laced the cocktails with Benzedrine.'
Piers Brendon on the diaries of Chips Channon (£).
https://literaryreview.co.uk/he-played-sardines-with-the-aga-khan
'Like so many of Ishiguro’s human narrators ... Klara contains within herself divisions and contradictions, pockets of knowledge that she isn’t able to synthesise fully.'
@infomodernist reviews 'Klara and the Sun'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/our-virtual-friend