When I was last a full time student I remember writing an essay that included the notion that someone may read Hamlet (by W Shakespeare) and consider it to be a comedy rather than a tragedy. Well, what goes around comes around as I have just read a book that is billed as a hugely funny book but that I find rather sad: a short history of the tractor in Ukranian.

The basic notion of this book is that an old Ukranian man falls for a much younger Ukranian woman. He has lived in England for decades and she lives in the Ukraine, so they want to be together in England.

The man is a widower of 84 years and she is a single mother with a son: she is 36 years old.

It goes down hill from there.

The man is clearly besotted yet his two daughters, who haven't spoken to each other for two years until now, line up against her. They feel that the new woman in their father's life is a sham and a fraud.

The young woman has large breasts and the daughter feel that their father can focus all too readily only on those assets.

The young woman is clearly a fraud, sleeping with everyone except the man that she eventually marries. Arguing, locking up the old man, verbally and physically abusing him. She lives in a complete mess with the inside of the house becoming buried under a mass of mess.

She also spends all of the old man's money, encourages him to sell the family silver (a la Margaret Thatcher), to get into debt. The son of the woman is reputed to be brilliant and just has to go to the local private school: more money needed please (his GCSE results give the lie to that scam).

And so on. I found all of this extremely sad and found almost nothing to laugh at or even to smile at.

I think I am in a small minority of people who haven't found this book funny but I cannot recommend it at all I'm afraid except to say that I thought the cover was extremely clever: very former Soviet Union and cardboard design!

I don't normally go back to my reviews to edit them but since this book was included in The Economist Books of the Year list, I thought I would redress the balance of my review with what they had to say:

The sluttish, rapacious blonde who is determined to marry the narrator's elderly widowed father brings a raw blast of reality from eastern Europe to a novel that has delighted audiences young and old. What you do with people you are supposed to like but don't trust or understand is the underlying conundrum of this comic feast in which the dialogue is entirely between educated people who lack a common language.

The Economist

Duncan Williamson
14 December 2005