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Here you will find older scratches, musings and other detritus that once were located on the front pages, but have now faded.

Filed away here to collect dust and cobwwwebs in perpetuity, links may break, facts may change and data may corrupt.

On occasion I may come down here to tidy, but for the most, I prefer to leave the past where it lies.

A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian

Marina Lewycka

'Two years after my mother died, my father fell in love with a glamorous blonde 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.'

Sisters Vera and Nadezhda must put aside a lifetime of feuding to save their émigré engineer father from voluptuous gold-digger Valentina. With her proclivity for green satin underwear and boil-in-the-bag cuisine, she will stop at nothing in her pursuit of Western wealth. But the sisters' campaign to oust Valentina unearths family secrets, uncovers fifty years of Europe's darkest history and sends them back to roots they'd much rather forget…

This comic exploration of relationships within Ukrainian and Russian families past and present picked up some critical aclaim, but I found it so so. It is an easy read, but I could quite happily put it down, and I didn't have any urgency to finish it. The situation is comedic, but the characters are mostly archetypes, with the East European eccentricities being amusing at first, but this can only go so far.

I am not sure what I expected, but perhaps, maybe unfairly, I had hoped for more.

11 Mar 2007 16:30 | (0) comments | Books