Strawberry Fields

Marina Lewycka's second novel replows the fish-out-of-water themes found in her first, A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian. For Americans, reading a novel about immigration in a British/Eastern European context, removes it from the political realm and allows us to focus sympathetically on the aspirations of the various characters and the misunderstandings that propel the plot. The main story revolves around the budding romance between Irina and Andriy, from two different social classes and regions in the Ukraine, which means their political world view-- communistic or capitalistic--is different. But Lewycka fills her tale with gangsters and farmers, good people and bad, from Poland, Malaysia, and Africa. She allows them to tell their own stories, and the result is often funny, sometimes bawdy, and moving. Some critics have complained that it verges on the cartoonish--but her humane sensibility, and the way she endows her simplest character with Christian wisdom that transforms the lives and perspectives of those he meets--makes this tale worth reading.