The bold and blistering debut novel “Endling,” by Canadian Ukrainian writer Maria Reva, is a shape-shifting, snail-hugging, war-weary, fist-shaking blast of a book. Publishing at the start of summer reading season, it has a lot on its mind. Pack sunscreen.
It’s early 2022, and 30-something malacologist Yeva has been on a tear, crisscrossing Ukraine to rescue rare snails with her jerry-rigged mobile lab. Currently in her care are 276 munching, sliming gastropods, a handful of which hold the dismal status of “endling” – their species’ final hurrah on the planet.
To fund her endeavor, Yeva works for Kyiv-based “boutique matchmaker” Romeo Meets Yulia. The agency, a down-at-the-heels outfit despite its aspirational marketing, serves a clientele of international men – dubbed “bachelors” – looking to woo and wed a Ukrainian woman (“brides” in the agency’s parlance). “May you find the One,” participants hear at the start of every event. Yeva has zero interest in being anyone’s One, but shows up as “the shining golden hay, just there to populate the parties … [and] keep the bride-to-bachelor ratio high.”
Why We Wrote This
It’s a rare debut novelist who can combine a seemingly random set of topics and make them cohere. Maria Reva wraps together serious subjects like war and extinction into an entertaining and meaningful book. Her meta message: Any life is worth saving.
Nastia, a recent high school graduate and fellow bride, approaches Yeva with a proposition: Be my driver in a bachelor kidnapping plan that will force the media to take notice of – and thus take down – Ukraine’s “bridal industry machine.” Yeva is horrified. Her camper-van lab is not a getaway vehicle, her science not a whim. But Nastia persists.
It gives nothing away to say that Yeva agrees to the plot with a pile of caveats and conditions. Four days and 275 restituted snails later, she and Nastia convince 12 bachelors to hand over their phones and pile into her newly emptied recreational vehicle under the pretense of an escape-room adventure. Two hours into the trip, Russia launches its first attacks on Ukraine – and narrative explosions ensue.
With a page turn and a “Part II” flourish, the story’s third person shifts to first, and fiction becomes metafiction. A writer in British Columbia is on the phone with her displeased agent. Glued to photos of Russia-bombed buildings, she worries about her grandfather in Kherson. One of two promised endings unfolds; there’s even the requisite acknowledgments and author bio.
The writing in this middle section winks, stretches, and all but tap-dances, but there’s anguish, too. How does one respond to war in a faraway homeland? What can – and should – art do in the face of violence?
And then the story resumes. Or, rather, it rewinds and unfurls anew as Yeva, Nastia, and their RV full of snookered bachelors weave around the country first in search of safety – and then, following a tip, in the hopes of finding a mate for Yeva’s favorite remaining snail, a looker with a left-spiraling shell named Lefty.
The story gets increasingly tense and, no surprise, tough. Actual war is underway with trigger-happy soldiers, propaganda-fed Russian transplants, and rubble-blocked roads. Yeva’s determination to locate Lefty’s potential One, regardless of the risks, sends her RV full of humans into dangerous territory and a burst of finales.
“Endling” is a work of real-time reckoning. The novel what-ifs and why-nots its way through issues as enormous as invasion and exploitation, and as intimate as missing a long-absent parent – or helping a lowly gastropod avoid extinction.
“Snails weren’t pandas – those oversize bumbling toddlers that sucked up national conservation budgets,” Yeva admits early in the story. “Snails were just that – snails.”
And certainly they, like any life and any country, are worth saving.
