Everyone loved this book when it came out, didn't they? I didn't like it so much. First there's the picaresque humour - the old man acting stupidly and irrationally over the obvious exploitative and semi-crooked "tart-ish" woman, who is also what would be called by many an illegal immigrant. The first-person narrator is politically wise to the nastiness of the stereotype, but she's really having her cake and eating it - managing to have a narrative that's a bit racist and sexist while also maintaining a distance from it. And picaresque - laughing at the stupidity of an old man - doesn't sit well with me. I never understood how anyone could find Don Quixote funny.
And the Ukrainian nationalism too. The book was written before the "Orange Revolution" and all of the stuff that followed, though after the break-up of the USSR. In the post-invasion period many progressives have become a lot less critical about the darker side of Ukrainian nationalism, and the people who bang on about it tend to be "Red-Brown" stooges for Putin. But it's there, and the book mentions in passing Stephan Bandera, and Symon Petliura, as Ukrainian nationalists without even alluding to their Nazi and pogromist histories. I can't believe that most readers of the book will know who they were, and won't learn that about them.
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