“For the tractor, despite its early promise to free mankind from grinding toil, has also brought us to the brink of ruin through carelessness and over use. This has happened throughout its history, but the most striking example is in America...
“I have said that it was the tractor which opened up the great prairies of the West. But those who followed the early pioneers were not satisfied with this. They believed that if use of tractors made the land productive, greater use of tractors would make the land more productive. Tragically it was not so.
“The tractor must always be used as an aid to nature, not as a driver of nature. The tractor must work in harmony with the climate, and the fertility of the land, and the humble spirit of the farmers. Otherwise it will bring disaster...”
The assessment of tractors comes from the writings of Nikolai Mayevska, an engineer, native to Ukraine, but a resident in Great Britain since shortly after World War II. Nikolai Mayevska is a fictional character, found within the pages of the novel, A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian.
Not to worry, the novel is entirely in English. It is the work of Marina Lewycka. Her Ukrainian born parents were encamped in a refugee camp in Kiel, Germany, when she was born in October, 1946, though she did much of her growing up in England. At the time of the publication of A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian in 2005, Ms. Lewycka taught at Sheffield Hallam University.
Though Ms. Lewycka authored six treatises on elder care, again, do not be confused, A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian is not a scholarly attempt. Perhaps a few of the opening lines will demonstrate the tone Ms. Lewycka is shooting for. “Two years after my mother died, my father fell in love with a glamorous blond Ukrainian divorcee. He was eighty-four and she was thirty-six. She exploded into our lives like a fluffy pink grenade, churning up the murky water, bringing to the surface a sludge of sloughed-off memories, giving the family ghosts a kick up the backside.”
The eighty-four year old is Nikolai Mayevska, who is, has for decades been, writing a relatively short history concerning the importance of tractors; writing in his native Ukrainian language then painstakingly translating into English. The narrator, his daughter, describes him reading an early section of his opus to her husband in the older man's home: “My father's voice drones up and down like a contented bumble bee. The room is warm and full of harvest smells. Outside the window, a purplish twilight is settling over the fields. A tractor is moving slowly up and down, already turning the burned-off stubble into the ground.”
A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian is at times wickedly funny, but it also relates a lesson of forgiveness concerning the tragedies of the past and their effect on the follies of life and love in the present. This, Marina Lewycka's first novel, earned a prize at the Hay Literary Festival in 2005. It was long-listed for the prestigious Man Booker Prize and short-listed for the Orange Prize for fiction in that same year. A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian has been translated into nearly three dozen languages.
There have been some criticisms of Lewycka's Ukrainian characters as simple caricatures, but the Times (of London) review said, “What makes this book more than just a jolly romp with political undertones is the way it captures the peculiar flavor of Eastern European immigrant life... Best of all is the author's rendering of the 'mongrel language' spoken by her characters whose fractured syntax and colorful neologisms give the narrative its snap... A very rich mixture indeed, as well as very enjoyable reading.”
I descend from a long line of choppers, fellers and ancestors who worked in the woods, A road runs south to north through this ranch, dating from a trail in the 1860s, and Indian trail before that. What we call the “new road,” that more or less parallels the more historic one, was bladed by a favorite cousin and his tractor in1960. So, in his honor, I think we should leave the last words to Nikolai Mayevska. “And so I leave you with this thought, dear reader. Use the technology which the engineer has developed, but use it with a humble and questioning spirit. Never allow technology to be your master, and never use it to gain mastery over others.”
(Tractors and timber fellers touted at: malcolmmacdonaldoutlawford.com.)
“Never allow technology to be your master,”
In the case of tractors, remember that a hand tool is still often the best alternative. It is OK, and often preferred to remove by hand a stick in the middle of a landing; to use a hand tool to divert water off a road; to us a saw to cut brush; to use a rake to level dirt. It doesn’t take that long, it does a better job, but you have to get your butt out of that tractor seat.
‘Great review of a lively book. I read it for a 10-person book club discussion in a distant city. Eight of us thought it contained humor. Two members, both close to the elder care and psych fields, thought it not funny and possibly fraught with elder abuse. What? My knee jerk reaction to that was to recall the carpenter’s predictable solution to the problem of a nail: Apply hammer, if in doubt. I liked your review better.
In case anyone’s curious–or bored–here are all the 1-star reviews of that book, on Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/product-reviews/0143036742/ref=acr_dpx_hist_1?ie=UTF8&filterByStar=one_star&showViewpoints=0
Here is one example from those reviews:
“I have a real problem with not finishing a book that I have already started, particularly if I have gone to the trouble of buying it. But that wasn’t the reason I endured it all the way to the final page. This book was one of those listed in the Economist’s “Best books of the 2005″ list, so I just read on, hoping in vain that at some point I would find something amusing about it.
Maybe I have a sense of humour failure but I just didn’t see anything at all funny about the plot, the linguistically challenged dialogues, or the characters. One of the reviewers here has quite rightly asked the question: why the tractors. They’ve got nothing at all to do with the plot. None whatsoever. The tractor sections are nothing more than the ramblings of a deluded and senile man who happens to know a thing or two about mechanical engineering. The repetitive jokes about the blonde ukrainian woman’s english get excruciatingly tiring after chapter 4 – and they were never that amusing to begin with.
I have the utmost respect for anyone who can put pen to paper and publish a book but, I’m sorry, this was really atrocious. If you, like I was, are tempted to buy this because of the all the rave reviews you have read, I strongly advise you to this: satisfy your curiosity by getting it from the library instead…and return it after chapter 3.”