Monthly Archives: August 2006

This book is delightful. I’m maybe 1/3 into it, and I’m particularly loving its portrayal of childhood. The story is told from the perspective of Rose, a child, who narrates the story of her family — two rather unusual and difficult parents and her three siblings. Check out this passage:

Together we met a lot more made-up animals, or rather discovered that a lot of real animals were made-up ones too. Once we went as far as Richmond Park and found a vast empire of rabbits who had odd political troubles, and a small and aristocratic community of deer who were terrible snobs. Papa overheard us talking about them, and explained that the older deer were evidently trying to preserve the Habsburg system of protocol, while the young ones wanted to introduce the easier German and English system. We instantly recognized that was true.

This is the view Rose’s mother has of children, as narrated by Rose (and I think perhaps this is West’s view too):

Moreover she understood children, and knew that they were adults handicapped by a humiliating disguise and had all their adult qualities within them.

Yes, but the adults in the novel have a lot of childlike qualities too, or at least they understand some things about chldren very well and think about the world in ways some might call childlike. Often the adults seem more childlike and the children more like adults. Rose often has a world-weary perspective, which she must, since her difficult family has taught her much already.

At any rate, an extraordinary novel about children and family.

I’m pausing from reading The Fountain Overflows to note that in my last post I said the story is narrated from the point of view of a child, Rose, which isn’t true at all: the story is narrated by Rose as an adult, looking back on her childhood. But the narrator only very occasionally refers to her adult self; most of the time, the story feels as though it’s told by a child. I get lost in the child’s world, and when Rose the adult speaks, I’m only momentarily brought up out of that world before I sink into it again. No wonder I wrote that it’s from a child’s perspective; the voice moves so seamlessly from child to adult and back again.

And what a voice the child-Rose has: intelligent, imaginative, knowing and grown-up, and yet sincere and childlike too.

Or is it the other way around: knowing and childlike, and yet sincere and grown-up too?

Okay, now back to the book.

I recently finished A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, by Marina Lewycka, which turned out to be a fun, if occasionally frustrating, read. I began it on vacation — it seemed like the perfect vacation book — and finished it shortly afterward. And it was the perfect vacation book, fast-paced, funny, entertaining.

First the good things: the characters are lively, the writing is interesting, quirky, and amusing, and the story absorbing. The novel tells the story of two sisters, Nadia and Vera, and their father, Nikolai, all from Ukraine and now living in England. The father, at 84 years old, has met Valentina, a 30-something woman and also from Ukraine, and fallen in love. Valentina, it seems clear, is interested in the relationship for self-serving reasons: she wants to stay in England. The plot centers around the sisters’s efforts to keep their father from marrying Valentina, and then trying to get him to extricate himself from the marriage once he has done so. Vera and Nadia (the story is told from Nadia’s perspective) have a rocky relationship; they have fought bitterly over their mother’s legacy and had not seen each other for a number of years because of their anger. So we read about their attempts to tolerate and begin to understand each other as they unite to help save their father. Valentina, it turns out, is their worst nightmare — unscrupulous, conniving, obsessed with money, and, at least in their father’s estimation, beautiful. This comes from Nadia’s perspective:

Then I see her — a large blonde woman, sauntering down the garden towards us on high-heeled peep-toe mules. Her gait is lazy, contempuous, as though she can barely be bothered to stir herself to greet us. A denim mini-skirt rides high above her knees; a pink sleeveless top stretches around voluptuous breasts that bob up and down as she walks. I stare. Such a wanton expanse of dimpled, creamy flesh. Plump bordering on fat … The mouth curls into a pout that is almost a sneer, drawn in pale peach-pink lipstick that extends beyond the line of the lips, as though to exaggerate their fullness.

Valentina is more than a match for Vera and Nadia and the battles they fight are merciless.

The novel is not all comedy, however, for the other part of the story is their dark family history, especially their experiences in World War II. Nadia, the younger daughter, pieces together the family history by pestering her reluctant older sister for information. It’s a dark history — of suffering under Stalin’s senseless and cruel policies, of hunger, of laboring in a German camp, of separation, of abuse. We get bits of the story interspersed throughout the comic sections of the novel, and this history adds weight and depth to the character’s experiences. Nikolai, the father, is writing a history of tractors in Ukraine (which explains the novel’s title) and through that history tells of the inventiveness and ingenuity as well as the suffering of Ukrainians.

We see how this history has shaped the characters’ present-day selves, particularly in the conflict between Vera and Nadia; in response to her history, Vera has become cynical and angry and mistrustful, and has become an unrepentant capitalist and individualist. Nadia, on the other hand, has a softer side. As much as she hates the harm Valentina is wreaking on her father, she respects the energy and determination she sees in her. She flirted with Communism in her younger years, much to her father’s distress, given his personal tragic experience with it, and now has settled into a quieter socialism. She is a Sociology professor, but Vera pointedly keeps referring to her as a social worker, expressing her disdain of Nadia’s profession and social ideals. The sisters spar continually, as in this passage, where the they discuss more recent immigrants:

“When we first came here, Vera, people could have said the same things about us — that we were ripping off the country, gorging ourselves on free orange juice, growing fat on NHS cod-liver oil. But they didn’t. Everyone was kind to us.”

“But that was different. We were different.” (We were white, of course, for one thing, I could say, but I hold my tongue.) “We worked hard and kept our heads down. We learned the language and integrated. We never claimed benefits. We never broke the law.”

“I broke the law. I smoked dope. I was arrested at Greenham Common. Pappa got so upset that he tried to catch the train back to Russia.”

“But that’s exactly my point, Nadia. You and your leftish friends — you never really appreciated what England had to offer — stability, order, the rule of law. If you and your kind prevailed, this country wold be just like Russia — bread queues everywhere, and people getting their hands chopped off.”

“That’s Afghanistan. Chopping hands off is the rule of law.”

….

“What I appreciated about growing up in England was the tolerance, liberalism, everyday kindness.” (I drive home my point by wagging my finger in the air, even though she can’t see me.) “The way the English always stick up for the underdog.”

“You are confusing the underdog with the scrounger, Nadia. We were poor, but we were never scroungers. The English people believe in fairness. Fair play. Like cricket.” (What does she know about cricket?) “They play by the rules. They have a natural sense of discipline and order.”

“No, no. They’re quite anarachic. They like to see the little man stick two fingers up to the world. They like to see the big shot get his come uppance.”

“On the contrary, they have a perfectly preserved class system, in which everyone knows where they belong.”

See how we grew up in the same house but lived in different countries?

Here is where the book excels: in its portrayal of the different ways people respond to the past and make sense of their history.

I was troubled, however, by some of the novel’s gender dynamics. The sister’s fight over whether their father deserves any sympathy for having fallen in love with some a young woman, and this becomes a fight over whether men can “help themselves” in the presence of a beautiful woman. This passage is an exchange between Nadia and her husband Mike; Mike says:

“But you can see it’s doing him good, this new relationship. It’s breathed new life into him. Just goes to show you’re never too old for love.”

“You mean for sex.”

“Well, maybe that as well. Your Dad is just hoping to fulfil every man’s dream — to lie in the arms of a beautiful younger woman.”

“Every man’s dream?”

That night Mike and I sleep in separate beds.

There is much sparring along these lines, feeding into stereotypes of men’s inability to control their sexuality and the need for women to patiently bear with their weakness. The women are often stereotypes as well, especially Valentina, who embodies the “femme fatale” figure perfectly. The author leads us to laugh at all this, but never critiques it and never asked us to question. Nadia objects occasionally to all the stereotypical behavior going on around her, but these objections are weak, and ultimately she learns to laugh with all the others and to stop being so difficult.

However, while I would wish to change the novel’s gender dynamics, I did find pleasure in reading this, particularly in the way Lewycka charts the relationship of past and present and the wildly different ways the characters make sense of what has happened to them.

I finished Elizabeth Taylor’s novel In a Summer Season over my vacation, and although I had some reservations about it at first, by the end, I was converted. It is a slow-moving book, and although some dramatic things happen at the novel’s end, for the most part, the book is quiet in tone and action. My reading of the book suffered from comparison with my previous fiction read, Jose Saramago’s Blindness, which was about large-scale social and political events and about barely hanging on to humanity and life. In contrast, Taylor’s themes of marriage, money, and the problems of leisure seemed small.

But that was entirely unfair, since for many people those themes are not small, and I really do like the type of novel that excels at anatomizing relationships and conversations and everyday struggles. Once I had thoroughly moved out of the world of Blindness, I adjusted to Taylor’s different pace and atmosphere and began to enjoy it.

The story is about a widowed woman, Kate, in her 40s who has married again, this time a man 10 years younger than she. Before her first husband died, she had seemed to be heading into a quiet life of reading and walking and listening to music with her cultured husband; she has two children who are nearly grown up, and plenty of money with which to live comfortably. The new husband, Dermot, changes all that, however — he is a completely different type, interested in nights at the pub rather than in the living room, unable to get Henry James references Kate’s friends make, a little too interested in fancy cars and aware of the attractiveness of younger women. Everyone around Kate expects the marriage to fail; they are all waiting for it to happen, rather gleefully. Kate knows this, and she also knows that she loves Dermot, and part of the novel’s interest is in what happens to their marriage — the ways Kate makes sense of what is happening to Dermot and to herself.

Kate’s old friend Charles and his daughter move back into their neighborhood, and the novel traces the relationships among the two families, the way the past weighs on them all, for Charles’s wife has died, and the two dead spouses haunt the living.

What is so delicious about the novel is Taylor’s probing of the characters’ minds. The reference to Henry James is not gratuitous: Taylor dissects the speech and body language and interactions of her characters in a wonderfully Jamesian manner. This, I think, is one of my favorite novelistic modes. But Taylor refers repeatedly to one specific James novel, The Spoils of Poynton, a book about people’s obsession with taste and houses and objects. One of Taylor’s characters gets involved in an antiques business, an obvious reference to Spoils, but the entire novel explores the relationship of people to their place and their possessions. Dermot feels more like a guest in Kate’s home rather than someone who belongs there, and this awkward relationship to place tells us something about his character.

I’m curious as to why Elizabeth Taylor is better known in Britain than America; before becoming a blog reader, I had never heard of her and I don’t think people I know have heard of her either. It interests me the way reading tastes and author fortunes differ on either side of the ocean.