Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | FICTION LEW | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
From the author of the international bestseller A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian comes a tender and hilarious novel about a crew of migrant workers from three continents who are forced to flee their English strawberry field for a journey across all of England in pursuit of their various dreams of a better future.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
U.K.-based Lewycka, a Booker and Orange Prize nominee for 2005's A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, follows up with a Chaucer-inspired tale of migrant workers trapped at global capital's thuggish bottom. After being "helped" into England by men like Vulk, an armed, lecherous creep of indeterminate former east bloc origins, a disparate group of strawberry pickers begins a pilgrimage-like search for labor across the countryside after their philandering boss is run over and crippled by his wife. Among them are two Ukrainians: Irina, a naive teenager from Kiev, and Andriy, a former coal miner. After a brief stop in Canterbury, the workers-from Malawi, China, Malaysia and elsewhere-arrive in Dover with their loyal dog. There, they unexpectedly meet shady "recruitment consultant" Vitaly, who promises jobs in "the dynamic resurgence of the poultry industry." The plot moves slowly, and things get worse for the group. Lewycka doesn't have a perfect command of all the cultures she aims to represent, making some of her satires broad and unfunny. There are, however, captivating scenes (some not for the squeamish), and many of the characters are complex and multifaceted, Irina and Andriy in particular. As a send up of capitalism's grip on the global everyman, Lewycka's ensemble novel complements Gary Shteyngart's Absurdistan. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
After a disastrous strawberry-picking season, Eastern European migrant workers take a road trip across "this other Eden...this earth, this realm, this England" in search of meaning, stability and perhaps even love. The disaster of the strawberry season is amorous rather than agricultural, for Wendy Leaping has discovered that her husband, the owner of the strawberry fields, is having a torrid relationship with Yola, the tough crew boss. When the cops are called after Wendy runs over her husband in a bright red sports car, the workers scatter. Several take off in the trailer that had provided their accommodation during picking season. In their search for more work they encounter corrupt individuals--English, Polish and Ukrainian--who want to exploit their vulnerable status as "guest workers." Handsome Andriy has become enamored of but separated from Irina, so he goes on a quest to find her. Along the way, his companion Tomasz finds work in a chicken factory (the ironically named "Buttercup Meadow Farmfresh Poultry"), and the novel makes a brief digression into naturalism as Lewycka (A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, 2005) does for chickens in England what Upton Sinclair did for cattle in Chicago. The narrative is polyvocal and includes points-of-view that shift fluidly from Irina to Emanuel (a Malawian worker who sends letters home to his sister) to the dog that tags along with the travelers (these sections all begin "I AM DOG") to an engaged and sympathetic third-person voice that identifies closely with Andriy. Some of the comic energy of the novel emerges from the difficulties characters encounter with the language barrier. Irina, for example, tries to figure out "what on earth...was a Moldavian toy boy?" Andriy is driven not just by his desire to recover Irina but also by his own idealized vision of Sheffield ("a place of palaces and bougainvillea"). Strawberry-sweet, but not too syrupy. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
New York Review of Books Review
THE young woman behind the counter at the beach boutique on Block Island was blond, ponytailed and suntanned. "Can I khelp you?" she asked a male customer as he wandered in, dazed from the sun. "Whoa, where you from?" he asked. "Moldova," was the reply, as she rang up a navy belt dotted with green whales. "This is my sommer job, then I go beck." "You should find an American husband and stick around," the man teased. The cashier grinned and lowered her eyes. "Maybe," she agreed. "But this is my third sommer here." It's easy to think of migration as a north-south phenomenon, or, rather, south-north: Central American farmworkers journeying to the United States to harvest crops, Turkish Gastarbeiter traveling to Germany for construction and restaurant jobs; Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis resettling in England to become shopkeepers, chefs or (in the case of a lucky few) writers, pop stars and industrial magnates. But in her new novel, "Strawberry Fields," Marina Lewycka, an Englishwoman born to Ukrainian parents in a refugee camp in Germany at the end of World War II, takes note of the westward migration that has been changing the landscape of England in recent decades. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the expansion of the European Union, it has been easier than it once was for Eastern Europeans to pick up their knapsacks and cross borders. Part of an earlier generation of refugees, imbued with nostalgia for the storied, soulful Eastern Europe of her parents' past, Lewycka seems to look on the incoming wave with less indulgence and more mortification than a nonimplicated person might. In her first novel, "A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian," one of the characters tells her wayward father: "Ukraina isn't like you remember it. It's different now. The people are different. They don't sing anymore - only vodka songs. All they're interested in is shopping. Western goods. Fashion. Electronics. American brand names." "Strawberry Fields" is also infused with this mournful perception. The novel focuses on the misadventures of a handful of migrant workers from Ukraine and Poland and their friends from more distant parts who've come to England to harvest berries or gut chickens, hoping to turn their pounds sterling into sacks of Ukrainian hryvnia and Polish zlotys back home - or, with a bit of luck, to hunker down in Britain permanently, fortified with "mobilfons" and wide-boy suits. Lewycka's hopelessly naïve 19-year-old heroine, Irina, a professor's daughter from Kiev, arrives at Farmer Leapish's "ramshackle strawberry farm" on Sherbury Down brimming with ill-founded optimism, hoping to harvest fodder for her Great Ukrainian Novel along with her bushels of berries. "The first thing I noticed was the light - the dazzling salty light dancing on the sunny field, the ripening strawberries, the little rounded trailer perched up on the hill," Irina reflects. Taking in the "pretty steep-roofed farmhouse," the lawn that slopes down to a "shallow glassy river" and the "woods beyond," she smiles to herself, thinking with relief, "So this is England." But Irina's England turns out to include as many Satanic mills as pleasant pastures, plus an immigrant wrangler named Vulk, with a greasy ponytail, who creepily calls Irina "little flovver" and longs to induct her into the flesh trade. "England is a change, little flovver," he tells her. "England is not like in you school book." Vulk is someone Irina's highbrow mother would call a "person of minimum culture," to say the least. Clueless as she is, Irina knows to keep out of Vulk's way, but she isn't nearly canny enough to keep Vulk out of hers. She would do well to accept the protection of a shy young Ukrainian migrant worker named Andriy, but she snubs him: "I haven't come all this way to spend my time fending off the advances of a miner from Donbas," she loftily decides. Dreaming of Natasha and Pierre's romance in "War and Peace" while keeping her eyes fixed on her strawberries, Irina risks slipping into a ditch of vice that anyone who saw the film "Dirty Pretty Things" will recognize: not as romantic as Tolstoy's landscape, but much more accessible. (And now, to the list of things first-worlders need to feel guilty about - S.U.V.'s, factory-farmed food, energy hogging - add a new item. Who has suffered so you can have strawberry shortcake?) A late-blooming fiction writer, Marina Lewycka produced a number of self-help books before "A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian" appeared two years ago. That splendid debut, which won several awards in Britain, reads like a memoir. Rich and strange in detail, magnanimous yet unsparing in tone, it presents an unairbrushed portrait of two quarreling middle-aged Ukrainian-English sisters, Vera and Nadia, who reconcile to save their stubborn father from a disastrous late marriage. Grotesquely decayed, pedantic and obsessed with the history of tractors, Nikolai is also an incurable romantic. At 84, he has married a 36-year-old Ukrainian immigrant named Valentina, who has a bra-busting bosom and an unquenchable yen for material goods - from breast implants and fancy cars to a gas stove and a British passport. "She exploded into our lives," Nadia, the younger sister, notes with dismay, "like a fluffy pink grenade." Vera, the hardheaded older sister, has no sympathy for the interloper: "We read about these people in the papers every day. Immigrants, asylum seekers, economic migrants," she tells Nadia. "It is always the most determined and ruthless people who make it over here, and then when they find it isn't so easy to get a good job, they will turn to crime." Nadia, mindful of her family's own immigrant past, wants to be tolerant, but even she succumbs to xenophobia. "I used to be liberal about immigration," she confesses. "I suppose I just thought it was all right for people to live where they wanted. But now I imagine hordes of Valentinas barging their way through customs at Ramsgate, at Felixstowe, at Dover, at Newhaven - pouring off the boats, purposeful, single-minded, mad." Such reluctant imaginings trickle like a narrow creek through "A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian," but in "Strawberry Fields" they swamp the story. The main characters - Irina; her Valentina-like Polish overseer, Yola; innocent Andriy; and the vile Vulk, along with a few other heavies - feel like the sort of caricatures you might see on an episode of "The Simpsons" or in one of Sacha Baron Cohen's send-ups of sleazy, dopey foreigners. When non-Slavs pop up on the landscape - a pious Malawian orphan named Emanuel who fears "canal knowledge"; a family of British toffs (pot-smoking son, vegetarian mum, whiskey-soaked dad) - they're equally cartoony. Each character's reflections are presented in a different voice, with solecisms that are meant to be funny but instead inspire cringing. Even a stray dog (named Dog) who befriends Irina and Andriy produces long, one-note, capitalized canine monologues: "FEMALE SAYS HOW BEAUTIFUL IS THE SONG OF THE BIRD SHE IS MORE STUPID THAN A SHEEP THAT BIRD IS NOT GOOD BIRD IF IT COMES DOWN FROM ITS TREE I WILL CATCH IT SNAP DEAD EAT I AM GOOD DOG I AM DOG." There's nothing wrong with weaving fractured English, inflated Eastern European ravings and an odoriferous hound into fiction. Jonathan Safran Foer succeeded brilliantly at it in his novel "Everything Is Illuminated," and Lewycka did the same herself (substituting odoriferous cats for the hound) in her first novel. But "Strawberry Fields" needed longer to ripen. Its plot suggests Vera's headlines, not Nadia's heartbeats, and the compassion the author undoubtedly feels for the literary-minded Ukrainian girl in the strawberry-stained jeans could have used more water, more sun and fewer stereotypes. As the schoolyard gibe goes, it takes one to know one. But writing what you know and writing what you think you know are often two very different things. Add one item to the list of things first-worlders need to feel guilty about. Who has suffered for your strawberries? Liesl Schillinger is a regular contributor to the Book Review.
Library Journal Review
Workers from Eastern Europe, China, and Africa toil to pick strawberries on a British farm, but when the farmer's wife runs down her cheating husband, they set off like Canterbury pilgrims. Following the celebrated debut A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian; with a five-city tour. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
