What do you do when you’re a Ukrainian-born Canadian fiction writer deep into the composition of your first novel, which is set in your homeland and written in the absurdist, dark comedic tradition of Kundera, Kafka and Hašek, when Russia suddenly invades your home country, your relatives start fleeing to safety while bombs explode all around them, and your beloved grandfather refuses to leave Kherson, which is being eviscerated in real time?
How can you keep on writing imaginatively when atrocities are being perpetrated against innocents in your homeland? Can you keep on living as before, when your reality has dramatically split in two?
Such was the dilemma facing Maria Reva while working on Endling. At first, she was seized by panic and debilitating self-questioning. She stopped writing the novel; fiction seemed a folly during times of existential crisis. The only way she could conceive of completing the novel was to fold all those questions into the trajectory of the plot.
She did that by breaking the fourth wall: inserting herself as a character narrating her own experience of stopping writing the novel to travel through her war-torn homeland. What began as fiction ended in nonfiction, making Endling neither a work of magical realism nor auto-fiction or memoir, but an original piece encapsulating elements of all three forms.
Though written in four parts, the book is riven in two by Russia’s very real invasion of Ukraine. The first fictional story is the cinematic unfolding of a complex metaphorical plot, which suddenly concludes by something like the running of credits at the end of a movie. The second section is marked by Reva actually entering the novel to recount her experience of viewing the horrors of wartime and retracing her failed efforts to encourage her grandfather to leave Kherson. But somehow the fictional plot is not left behind, and is woven into the war narrative. What results is a braided tale of extinction, survival and love, concluding in the resurrection of hope.
If this sounds like an unattainable ambition, it might just be, but what must be admired is Reva’s determination to finish the novel as an act of both desperation and renewal.
So what is the plot? And what exactly is an endling? The story revolves around three Ukrainian women, Yeva, Nastia and Solomiya, who meet working for a romance tour company, Romeo Meets Yulia, which brings eager bachelors to Ukraine in search of “docile” Eastern European wives untainted by feminism.
In truth, Yeva is a maverick scientist, a malacologist, who scours Ukraine’s forests and valleys in her mobile RV laboratory, collecting, cultivating and nurturing snail endlings – the last existing specimens of a species – in the hope of keeping their lines alive. Why snails? Because “gastropods have evolved to live anywhere on the planet … have gills to live on water, or have lungs to live on land … can survive extreme temperatures, unsuitable for human life … and possess both male and female parts and reproduce solo”.
Yeva believes herself to be an endling; she has no desire to marry or reproduce, despite familial pressure to do so. In fact, she has procured a canister of hydrogen cyanide to see herself out when the time is right, as well as a bridal dress to be buried in. Working as an eligible “docile” bride is lucrative, and her earnings are funding her scientific experimentation because government grants have run dry.
The other two protagonists, beautiful Nastia and her sister Solomiya, who are also entangled in the booming marriage industry, posing as a hopeful bride and her translator while secretly searching for their missing mother, who vanished after years of fierce activism against the romance tours.
Their mother is renowned for organising guerrilla theatre protests, not unlike the members of Russian radical pop band Pussy Riot. The sisters are concocting a huge public political act, mimicking their mother’s exploits, in the hope that global attention will bring her out of hiding. The sisters know about Yeva’s RV, and are hoping she will allow them to use it, because their grand plan is to kidnap a group of bachelors under the ruse of taking them to a special event where they will finally meet the women of their dreams. That kidnapping, they believe, will expose the exploitation of Ukrainian girls and women and bring universal attention to their plight.
The women plot and persevere. Luring the bachelors into their RV along with Lefty, a last-of-his-kind snail with one final shot at perpetuating his species, they are on their way. But on the road, they hear what they believe to be fireworks and soon learn Ukraine has been invaded by Russia. Rather than driving away from the fierce fighting, they move towards it in search of Lefty’s last living mate. At this point in the fictional narrative, the curtain falls, the imagined tale is over, credits roll and the author offers her thanks to all those who have helped her publish this fiction.
Then the second part begins and the reality of war sets in. Maria has entered Ukraine and is narrating her journey to save her grandfather, but the three women are still on the road, kidnapped bachelors in tow, in search of a snail.
This non-fictional fiction I found gripping but confusing, and also a bit of a slog. Like the RV going off-road, the story veered into allusive and metaphorical tangents filled with elegant explanations of snail copulation and gruesome depictions of slaughter. But like the kidnapped bachelors, I often felt like I was being driven through a void in the dark, not knowing where I or the plot was going.
In the end, I admired the novel’s intelligence, dark humour and ambition, as well as the author’s stated belief that “life gives you an opening, even during the most horrible times”. For in our worst moments, stories, real or imagined, remain, so we never forget and never lose hope.
