Marina Lewycka: Various Pets Alive and Dead

[leyla]

*Here's my review in today's Indy on Sunday of Marina Lewycka's new novel. She was born in Kiel, Germany, but has lived most of her life in England, so am not sure what her nationality is, strictly speaking ( in terms of choosing the right flag.)


http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-en...a-7605949.html

[Threetrees]

Leyla, put her national flag as that of Ukraine.
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A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian is a tender and funny book, but doesn’t pull its punches. Some of the finest comic moments come from the lips of the Ukrainian characters, garbling their English in rage. Valentina, the blonde gold-digger, who explodes into the lives of the narrator and her father “like a fluffy pink grenade”, angrily spills out classics like “No good meanie oral sex maniac husband”. There’s a tension in the comedy, not unlike that of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is illuminated, where the pidgeon English of the main characters (coincidentally Ukrainian) drives the laughter. Lewycka, of Ukrainian parentage herself, dismisses the notion though that perhaps the comedy is a patronising one, a comedy that serves to confirm stereotypes. “Patronising? Come on, what would life be if we weren't allowed to laugh at human foibles?”, she responds, continuing: “When I wrote the dialogue, I just wrote what came into my head, it all just came out, and looking back I realise that what I have done, very often, is to translate literally what someone would have said in Ukrainian into English. There is always a 'clunkiness' about translated language which can be quite funny. I love reading travel guides and tourist information written in English by people whose first language is not English, and who do just that – translate literally. But I also found that once you abandon the rules of 'good English', it gives you a tremendous freedom to play with the language, and to be more vivid and expressive than 'good English' will allow. “
The obscure title refers to a book within the book, being written by Nikolai the narrator’s father, detailing the contribution of the humble tractor to modern Ukraine’s violent history. Missing the point completely, a reviewer for the august Yorkshire Post mused that if the Booker prize had a category for most boring title ever Lewycka would win. In fact the curious and absurd title fits the book perfectly, drawing the reader into a strange and disconcerting world of human weaknesses. Lewycka was born to Ukrainian parents in a refugee camp in Kiel in the aftermath of the Second World War, and her father has actually written a book on the history of tractors in Ukrainian, leading interviewers such as myself to splutter out “autobiographical?” eagerly. She’s tactful in her response – “Many of the events started in autobiography, but as the characters took on a life of their own, and became distinct from the people in MY life, so they created their own stories” – though one could imagine that inwardly she must be heartily fed up of questions that dwell on her life rather than her fiction. “My father did write a history of tractors,” she says of the title, “but his book is very different from mine. It is full of technical detail. But I thought the idea of someone writing this was so funny, and once I started looking into the world of tractor enthusiasts, I just got hooked. Tractors are like Mother: close to the earth, hardworking, and undervalued. They lack glamour, but they feed the human race, and they changed the world.”
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[Liam]

I gave her the British flag because Lewycka is a British writer/citizen, living in the UK, writing novels in English. Following your logic, we should be putting Joseph Conrad under the Polish flag.

[Eric]

Liam is perfectly correct. Otherwise we would have to give Joseph Conrad (as Liam suggests) a Polish or maybe Russian Empire flag, Anita Brookner a Polish flag, Nabokov a Russian flag, ignoring his later American novels written in English, George Szirtes a Hungarian flag, and Kazuo Ishiguro a Japanese flag, Elias Canetti a Bulgarian flag, etc, etc.

These flags are great fun to use, but they have to be used with care and knowledge. Marina Lewycka's surname pronounced (leh-VITT-ska) doesn't look entirely Ukrainian, wherever her dad came from. And whether she is a Peterborough, Doncaster, or Sheffield writer is also under dispute.

A further mystery is, therefore, why she spells her surname in a Polish way. If her surname was transliterated from the Ukrainian it would be Levitska or Levytska (not quite sure, as I've not seen the name in Cyrillic). Whereas, you do not transliterate Polish names, as the Poles use the same alphabet as we do. Were her parents perhaps from the Polish-speaking minority that was quite large between the wars? Or was the surname spelt like that in the refugee camp in Kiel (many East Europeans ended up in Displaced Persons' Camps in West Germany after WWII, as Stalin was building his empire on the other side of the Iron Curtain) because the Germans spelt it that way?

So names and flags are interesting to examine, but they can raise a lot of interesting issues involving identity and language.

[Threetrees]

Pardon me, gentlemen, I thought I was addressing to Leyla.) The principal point was to define
*Marina Lewycka's nationality. I only suggested, I didn't insist. If you can read beneath the lines, you can not but see what she tells us. No references to the Polish stuff. Her characters are mainly the Ukrainians. If one is able to translate his/her own thoughts into foreign language (English here), does it fully mean then that he/she belongs to the English-speaking-thinking world?
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“Ukraine is a small country most of whose history has been spent in the shadow of one imperial power or another. Ukrainians have never conquered anybody, or gone to war except in self-defense (apart from the tragedy of internal strife). It is a rural country, dependent on agriculture, where most people live in villages or small towns, and are relatively unsophisticated. I think that does give us a peculiar innocence which we share with countries like Ireland and New Zealand. I tried to put that across especially in the 'tractor' episodes.”
Marina Lewycka
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Following your logic, Liam, we should ask Joseph Conrad and others what he (others) thinks of his national identity) - or you in the matter of your sexual one in your case. Was it your trick to remove my comment?

Sincerely, Earth Globe Icon.

[Eric]

Judging by my quick flick through the pets book in the bookshop yesterday, I get the feeling that Lewycka is no longer promoting the Ukrainian side of her background, but has gone on to autobiographical things. Personally, the idea of a Ukrainian author writing about Ukraine interests me more. I don't think I'll bother with the pets book.

[leyla]

Eric, this book isn't autobiographical at all! The character from the ex-communist European country is an investment banker, and the other characters are the parents of a hippy family and their children. It's 3.44 am and I'm glancing at this forum in an insomniac daze, so I won't write more, but I just wanted to dispel the rumour that this book is autobiographical in any way. Threetrees, I'll hopefully read your comments at a later date, things are a bit busy just now with various things flaring up all at once. And I need to get some sleep! X