I have a purely my personal wish, which is: every country in the world must have literary works. I plan to read it at least once in every country. By doing this, read the whole world. So I have read a lot of books on strange countries.
My friend heard my wish and asked me: Which country is the hardest to find books?
I said: It’s hard to say. Because there is cultural exchange between countries, even in small countries with almost no literary works, some translations often appear in libraries - it is only possible in libraries, not in the market, and no one will buy them.
But, it is normal not to have it - maybe there are no literary works.
In short, some small countries often appear in the news, and I realized: I have never read their books.
She asked me: Which countries?
I said: Tong plus . I haven't seen a Tonga book in the library.
She asked me again: Which countries have you seen?
I said: Seychelles , Mauritania , Sierra Leone, Yemen ... Kyrgyzstan , Kazakhstan ... I think this is more famous, so there is no need to list them one by one?
She asked me again: Have you read the books of Ukrainian writers? I haven't read them.
I said: No, all Chinese people have seen it.
She said: You said Paul Kochakin ?
I said: Well, now in the library, all kinds of versions of "steel" are placed under the name of Ukrainian literature.
In addition to this, I have read three writers related to Ukraine.
A book "A Brief History of Ukrainian Tractors"
A book "A Brief History of Migrant Workers in the UK".
all authors are Malina Lyuwika . She was born in a refugee camp in Kiel, Germany at the end of World War II . Both her parents are Ukrainian. She grew up in the UK. Teaching at Sheffield Hallam University.
58 years old, she published her first book, "A Brief History of Ukrainian Tractors":
Two years after my mother passed away, my father fell in love with a divorced charming Ukrainian blonde. He was eighty-four at the time, and she was thirty-six.
She suddenly exploded in our lives like a fluffy pink grenade , stirring up muddy water, rolling a lot of mud that had been sinking into the mud of memory for a long time onto the water surface, and kicking the ghost of our family hard in the butt.
Another book is "The Melancholy of the Penguin", a novel by contemporary Ukrainian writer Andrei Kurkov.
My friend asked me: Does it look good?
I said: My own reading experience, language is more important than nationality or blood relationship.
written in English is an English novel;
written in Russian is an Russian novel.
Luweika's book is an English novel.
Kurkov's book is a Russian novel.
Among all the novels, I like to read English novels the most.
Another ambition is to finish reading the Booker Prize (English Literature Works Award) works.
By the way, "A Brief History of Ukrainian Tractors" is a book I like quite a bit.
can read it because of two misunderstandings:
First I thought this was a British novel - yes, the author Marina Lyuwika is British, but at the same time, she is also a Ukrainian born in a refugee camp.
Blood ties are destiny, which is the silent epic that flows in the blood;
Second I thought I was talking about a light comedy, and the back cover said; "It is a humorous novel that shakes the 'Botticelli-style breasts'."
And: "This book makes me smile all year long and smile. Always open."
The first sentence of the opening is: "Two years after my mother passed away, my father fell in love with a divorced charming Ukrainian blonde. He was eighty-four at the time, and she was thirty-six."
I was ready to laugh, intending to enjoy the cold British humor, but I forgot which paragraph it was, and suddenly shed tears out of control. This is how the story begins. The old father intends to marry a blonde girl from his hometown of Ukraine.
His two daughters believe that the girl has bad intentions, one is for the right to reside in the UK and the other is for the elderly’s money.
They are jumping up and down to make the marriage invalid, want their father to divorce, and want the girl to be deported.
In the end, the marriage and divorced, and the old father was out of the sea of suffering. For a long time, parents refused to tell their children the real pain, and they also revealed it to their daughters one by one.
My sister finally understood why when she was young and ignorant, she would run away from home with a box on the streets.
My sister has been worried about it for many years and finally understands the origin of the scar on her father's neck.
Her father: Don’t want to fight—not fight for the motherland, not fight for the Soviet Union, not fight for anyone.
He wanted to sit in front of his desk, holding the ruler and blank paper, and meditate on the resistance ratio equation.
My father is like this.
He is not very good at becoming a scientist, but he is an excellent engineer who can assemble all the household appliances of that era.
Until he got old and had not been an engineer for many years, I once asked him bored: Can you assemble a refrigerator?
Answer: Give me a compressor .
My sister recalled the mother like this:
My mother has a storage room under the stairs, which is full of food from the floor to the ceiling;
A listening to the fish, meat, tomatoes, fruits, vegetables and pudding system, bags of sugar (sweet sugar, fine sugar, rock sugar, brown sugar) , flour (ordinary powder, self-produced powder , whole wheat flour ) , rice...
(Where can anyone who has experienced war and hunger do not know how to stock up?
Compared with here, my mother's stocking up only has the difference in variety. There are more noodles, glutinous rice and glutinous rice, less canned food, and the configuration and nature are exactly the same.
By the way, my mother will use even the used fresh bags repeatedly, wash them on the faucet, and dry them on the tiles.)
And the thirty-six-year-old blonde is not a lazy person.
She took her son to make a living, worked hard, and worked day and night in nursing homes and restaurants. She just wanted to stay in the UK, but couldn't do it.
She left the intellectual husband and married a person who was forty-eight years older than herself - do you think it's easy for her?
If that is the chicken-skinned hair that makes strangers feel disgusted, what kind of torture would it be in bed?
Why is this?
If Ukraine could be a land where people can live and work in peace, why would it be? In the book
, my sister is a person who loves money as much as her life. And my sister is a socialist who is indifferent to fame and fortune.
They fought endlessly throughout their lives.
Until the end, they found that they had a common memory:
They were still young at that time, and their mother took them to the streets, and they knew they were poor and hungry at first sight.
A kind-hearted person sympathized with the three of them, and came over and stuffed some money into his mother's hand: to buy stutters for the children.
Both mother and daughter were embarrassed, but they could not refuse because they were really short of money.
(Long Yingtai also said that when she was in Germany, she met a kind stranger to give her charity.)
At the same moment, my sister was determined to become a rich man.
And my sister is determined to make the world equal.
