Submitted by admin on Sun, 2007-03-25 08:00. ::
IF MARINA Lewycka had known how popular her first novel was going to be, would she still have published A Short History Of Tractors In Ukrainian? A book that began as an attempt to write her family history, it soon morphed into the tale of two sisters and their response to their octogenarian, randy father when he announces his intention to marry a young Ukrainian bombshell with "superior breasts" called Valentina.
Fiction it may have been, but the narrator bore an uncanny resemblance to Lewycka: both teach at a university, are married to mild-mannered men and have a sister and daughter - and both the father on the page and the one in real life wrote a book about tractors and married a much younger woman.
Lewycka's debut turned her, at 57, into an overnight publishing sensation. She was longlisted for the Booker, nominated for the Orange Prize, and was the first woman to win the coveted Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize.
"I had no idea it was going to be published, let alone read by so many people," she says. "If I had, I probably would have changed minor aspects of it, but then it wouldn't have been the same book, would it? Maybe I should have held back publishing it until after my father died." She describes her father, who is now 94 and living in a care home, as "pleasantly bonkers" and adds that he hasn't read the book.
A Short History Of Tractors In Ukrainian, which was famously filed under 'agriculture' on Amazon when it was first published, transformed Lewycka's life in more ways than one. The book reunited her with her family in Ukraine following a lifetime of estrangement, which in turn planted the seed for her new novel, Two Caravans.
"It was while I was researching Tractors that I found a family search website," she recalls. "I keyed in my parents' surnames and six months later I got all these replies from my first cousins. My parents had assumed that either they were all dead or that it would be impossible to contact them. The country was completely blasted and people's lives were turned inside out, but somehow my family managed to survive."
Born in a refugee camp in Germany during the aftermath of the Second World War - after which her Ukrainian parents took her and her sister to live in England - Lewycka had never been to her parents' home country before. "It was a very emotional reunion," she recalls of her trip to meet relatives on both sides of her family.
During it, she met people she wanted to write about. They eventually became the two main characters in Two Caravans, Irina and Andriy, one representing the progressive, middle-class west and the other the working-class east in modern-day Ukraine. "In real life the two people didn't meet but I like to think that they would have fallen in love if they had," she says.
The novel is a high-octane caper around the English countryside, following a group of migrant workers from Eastern Europe, Africa and China and a heroic dog as they pick strawberries, get exploited by gangmasters and fall in and out of love. It's a typical Lewycka treatment of serious subjects such as immigration and globalisation, with plenty of farcical humour and high jinks, though at points the ambitious plot strands unravel and the novel loses its way. It does, however, have the same warmth and affection that characterised her debut and which are so evident in her personality too.
Her love of the tragicomic, a genre that endeared Tractors to so many, comes from both the Eastern European tradition of the absurd - "about life being so ridiculous and stupid that you have to make a joke out of it" - and the black humour in Sheffield, where she has lived more than half her life. "There are lots of funny women in Yorkshire," she tells me.
Humour is also something she has embraced with age. "I've got more and more jolly as I've got older. I've become a bit braver about letting it show. I really recommend ageing - once you get past a certain age nothing matters very much." Before Tractors, her writing was more serious and subtle and she points out that the 36 rejection letters she received suggest nobody got her jokes.
"I didn't want to write a book about people being miserable and exploited," she says, returning to Two Caravans. "I wanted it to be about people making the best of a tough situation. I could have done it differently but it just wouldn't have been me. Every time I was about to make a grim point something funny would intervene." When I ask her if her next novel will continue in this vein, she says, "can I get any humour out of the Israel-Palestine conflict?" As for the unpublished novels and poetry she has written since the age of four that lie in a drawer, "Hopefully somebody will put it all on eBay after I'm dead."
Inspired as much by Chaucer's Canterbury Tales as she was by trade union pamphlets on migrant workers and books about where the food on our supermarket shelves comes from, Lewycka has dedicated the novel to the 21 Morecambe Bay cockle pickers who drowned after being cut off by the tides in 2004. When she first started working on Two Caravans her intention was to write "a jolly romp about a bunch of immigrants having sex and hopping in and out of each other's caravans", but when she started to do the research, darker concerns crept into the strawberry fields.
Despite having been translated into 29 languages, Tractors has not been published in Ukraine. "I was very, very hurt at first and felt quite rejected and sad," she says. "But I think I understand it now. Ukraine is a very new country and takes itself quite seriously, so it didn't want to be represented on the world stage by an incontinent old man and a woman with enormous breasts. Hopefully this book will be different."
One of the greatest joys of the success that has come later on in life, she says, is being able to write every day, propped up in bed with her laptop and her husband bringing her bowls of porridge.
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