Libra
Active Member
Nominated for the Man Booker Prize.
This is what reads on the front cover and made me buy the book:
"Two years after my mother died,my father fell in love with a glamorous blond divorcee.He was eighty-four and she was thirty-six.She exploded into our lives like a fluffy pink grenade..."
Although this is what the main story is about,there is so much more entwined in these 294 pages.
Two sisters raised in the same household but so different in character and mentality.
Vera,the eldest,an abrupt and to the point about the realities of life and human nature.
Nadezhda,a more diplomatic,,hopeful but "don't want to rock the boat and make trouble" kind of character who doesn't say everything that needs to be said.
Two sisters who try to get along to save their father from the "fluffy pink grenade"
Nadezhda:
"I am a forty-seven year old and a University lecturer,but my sister's voice reduces me instantly to a bogey-nosed four year old"
Nadezhda walking in the room wearing all black plain clothing get's a comment from her sister Vera on how she is dressed.
"Yes,the peasant look ,I see."
" Nothing wrong with peasants.Mother was a peasant" four-year old retorts."
Through the story of these two sisters trying to save their father,you go into Russia,Ukrainia,labor camps,how the tractors came about,famine,Stalin and the struggles for a better life.
In the process, the sisters try to find a better understanding of each other and accepting the differences they have.
From wiki:
"The novel details in comic form the varied reactions by two daughters when their widowed father marries a much younger Ukranian immigrant. The father, a former engineer, is writing a history of tractors in Ukranian, details from which are interleaved throughout the text."
This is what reads on the front cover and made me buy the book:
"Two years after my mother died,my father fell in love with a glamorous blond divorcee.He was eighty-four and she was thirty-six.She exploded into our lives like a fluffy pink grenade..."
Although this is what the main story is about,there is so much more entwined in these 294 pages.
Two sisters raised in the same household but so different in character and mentality.
Vera,the eldest,an abrupt and to the point about the realities of life and human nature.
Nadezhda,a more diplomatic,,hopeful but "don't want to rock the boat and make trouble" kind of character who doesn't say everything that needs to be said.
Two sisters who try to get along to save their father from the "fluffy pink grenade"
Nadezhda:
"I am a forty-seven year old and a University lecturer,but my sister's voice reduces me instantly to a bogey-nosed four year old"
Nadezhda walking in the room wearing all black plain clothing get's a comment from her sister Vera on how she is dressed.
"Yes,the peasant look ,I see."
" Nothing wrong with peasants.Mother was a peasant" four-year old retorts."
Through the story of these two sisters trying to save their father,you go into Russia,Ukrainia,labor camps,how the tractors came about,famine,Stalin and the struggles for a better life.
In the process, the sisters try to find a better understanding of each other and accepting the differences they have.
From wiki:
"The novel details in comic form the varied reactions by two daughters when their widowed father marries a much younger Ukranian immigrant. The father, a former engineer, is writing a history of tractors in Ukranian, details from which are interleaved throughout the text."
