The Sense of an Endling
Yeva, the protagonist of Maria Reva’s debut novel Endling, sits firmly in the driver’s seat of her white van as she collects snail species and crosses Ukraine in various gears, time zones, and missions of recovery. Like her biblical namesake, she leaves a garden in her mobile lab and takes on Adam’s role of naming creatures: “The original Yeva, biblical Eve, had no such choice. God put her in front of Adam, and that was that.” Subverting stereotypes and archetypes with feminist humour, the novel invokes Genesis again in Yeva’s rescue missions: “She’d steer her Noah’s Ark to every nook and cranny of the country, no leaf unturned.” Reva and Yeva turn leaves of truth in their endlessly engaging quests.
“Outpacing its own snails, Endling is a metafictional novel that plays fast with fact and fiction, Reva and Yeva, history and fantasy.”
Outpacing its own snails, Endling is a metafictional novel that plays fast with fact and fiction, Reva and Yeva, history and fantasy. The first epigraph to the novel is taken from Galician writer Chus Pato: “People don’t live history, they live their lives. History is a catastrophe that passes over them.” These remarks recall Walter Benjamin’s comments on Paul Klee’s painting “Angelus Novus”: “This is how one pictures the angel of history…. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe.” The novel perceives and pursues history and catastrophe through its four major characters – Yeva, sisters Solomiya and Anastasia, and Pasha who is on his own Ukrainian quest of identity.
The second epigraph, from Zsuzsi Gartner, also recalls catastrophe surrounding Klee’s angel of history: “I’d rather go down in flames, quite frankly, than have a nice little book. I’d rather go down screaming in flames. You can quote me on that.” The two quotations flow into the “Prologue” which paints a Ukrainian landscape of fields and farmhouses: “Once, a fragment of comet, catching the breaths of those who witnessed in terror the flash of light – but when it was over they clapped at the miracle.” Witnessing terror and illumination, one applauds Reva’s beginnings, endings, and cosmic fragments.
From the outset Reva carefully lays down her markers: “Anastasia, the girl called herself.” Yet for the most part she is called Nastia, nesting midway between her longer, more formal name and her objectification as “the girl.” The second sentence shifts focus to Yeva who observes Nastia: “Achingly young – too young, thought Yeva, to be taking part in the romance tours.” Both females are involved in these Ukrainian tours where they are “brides,” while Nastia’s older sister Sol serves as her “interpreter” – a mediator between the bachelors (foreigners looking for women) and the brides. (There is a hint of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian ethos in these scenes.) The reader is also an interpreter observing the visual exchanges between characters: “Yeva would be getting talked at by some bachelor, and from across the banquet room or yacht deck she’d notice the girl watching her intently, round blank face trained on her like a telescope dish.” The narrator exploits the female gaze through telescopic and microscopic lenses.
While “the girl was into God,” Yeva remains indifferent to her plight. “All those earthly worries she used to have – mollusk conservation, romantic prospects, the Russian tanks amassing at the border and how no one believed anything would become of it except Yeva, who according to her family was always crying wolf and blowing everything out of proportion, prattling on about the collapse of this ecosystem or that, ruining all the fun, ruining, on behalf of barely there river turtles, the marriage agency’s balloon release over the Dnipro – blah, blah, blah.” The concluding etcetera holds an entire ecosystem of excitement and extinction, as Klee’s angel struggles across the Ukrainian battlefield. The snail-like sentence blows out of proportions, nesting its phrases like a matryoshka doll from Yeva’s mobile lab.
Yeva becomes involved with the romance tours when a blue-eyed blonde approaches her at a gas station as she refills her mobile lab. The woman invites her to a party where she wins $1000 in a raffle and is therefore able to refurbish her mobile lab with “more realistic terrarium landscapes” travelling through a metafictional landscape that blends realism and fantasy, with parentheses that curl as snails through her prose narrative. “Snails! …. with their highly reflective shells and the insulating properties of their spirals…. How they represented … joy and rebirth, the shape of their shells the circle of life.” Snails represent life’s cycles and the spiral design of Endling. Except in fiction, they aren’t interactive with humans. “A crunch under the boot. A speck to flick off a lettuce leaf. Not much better than slugs. The genus name gastropod woefully uninspiring: stomach-foot. Dumb and slow…. Snails were just that – snails.” Under foot, leaf, and rose, a snail is a snail is a snail spiralling from beginning to endling. They stay in place and pace slowly from Yeva’s eyes that roam from Nastia to terrarium: “When she lifted her eyes, the world seemed separate from her, a movie in comical fast motion.” A comedic moving picture appears later in the novel with Russians filming Ukrainian territory for propaganda purposes. Yeva’s mobile lab shifts gears and speeds through comedy and tragedy, colourful romance and grim realism. Since she is on a rescue mission, the snails are stand-ins for humans: “She toured all around the country, including the self-proclaimed People’s Republic of Donetsk and Luhansk, where the war puttered on.”
In one shelled parenthesis she fails to rescue a dozen Annilika severus from their ravine at the base of the Carpathians – their taxonomy underscoring severance and severity. At other times Yeva is more successful in saving species. She follows the terrarium cam on her phone where two Pacillum dulcis circle each other for hours stabbing and counter-stabbing in ritualistic and comic copulation. Comedy runs through her internet connections where a radio show about snails is called a gastropodcast, which concludes with “So-nailed it.”
This comic beat goes on after “helicologist”: “(Helix being a predominant genus for shelled land snail)” as well as a reference to the helical shape of Reva’s novel. Two hundred and seventy-six specimens and “eclipsazoology” belong to her snailing comedy: “Her lofty long-ago conservation mission made her laugh now.” For every comic twist, a serious side: “They’d adapt to ever-scorching climes, droughts, floods. They just needed time to do so in peace, without people around. Snails were, by definition, slow.” She and her Hawaiian colleague Kevin record their extinction through a “time stamp” for each endling. Endling is filled with humour and pathos bathed in an ecosystem of empathy. Remotely, Kevin is in love with her, their relationship snail shelled: “She couldn’t remember his face anymore, but she wanted his voice again, for that voice to curl around her like snail shells.” Two years after she stops speaking to him she travels around the country with a reverse mission: instead of collecting snails, she “restituted them.” If the East of Ukraine is “cratered by shelling,” the war’s entomology and etymology come full circle in the textual curls of snail shells. Even Yeva’s trailer is a shell.
Chapter 2 opens with Yeva and Nastia greeting each other with “May you find the One” – a singular contrast between the multitude of snails and suitors, and Yeva’s joke that she’s “found the right none.” The chapter ends with “zero consideration” before the next chapter multiplies names for Maria from Manya to Mashenka – “The way a Slavic name can bend and fold in countless forms.” Matryoshka dolls nest in names and multiply in the endless folds of Endling. Nastia’s feminist mission is to kidnap as many bachelors as possible and thereby expose the romantic tours during the hijack and hijinks across Ukraine in a white van driven by Yeva, Nastia, and Sol with a dozen or so bachelors locked in the back.
Part II shifts gears and turns autobiographical with Reva in or near Vancouver talking to her agent Rufus Redpen, “which sounds fictional, because he is, mostly. I have otherwise given up on fiction.” But she has not given up on metafiction as she describes her novel in progress. She then turns to dialogue between “Unfamous Author” and “Yurt Makers” who conclude that “the world is a whore.” The author then turns to the epistolary mode in an exchange of letters between herself and a magazine editor who rejects her essay, “Never Too Soon: Humor as an Act of Survival in Ukraine” – one of the strategies throughout Endling. She then pivots to her grant application to fund travel to Ukraine for her novel. Reva’s irony and inventiveness shed light on her novel, “as well as the groundbreaking metafictional elements prominently displayed within the protonovelistic oeuvre of Salvador Plascentia’s People of Paper.”
These books are groundbreaking in more than one sense since the bombs in Ukraine literally break its ground. Reva’s ironic anxiety of influence follows: “Thus fortified by the literary beacons that have illuminated the path before me, Endling seeks to transcend the boundaries of conventionality while being grounded in the timeless questions of the human condition.” Reva shifts the ground in her commentary on her own fiction. Endling ends with its own ending, which gets subverted: “Here’s how it all ends: happily, believably,” for the happy, believable ending is not meant to be. The war ends happily ever after: “Oh, and the bachelors? The ones Nastia, Sol, and Yeva took hostage? Before the Kherson mission they’d been dropped off at the nearest border, the one with Poland or Slovakia or wherever, and released into the throngs of journalists and humanitarian aid volunteers who plied them with barley soup.” Then, at page 131 we come to the “END” of the novel, which is dutifully and convincingly followed by pages of “Acknowledgments,” “About the Author,” and “A Note on the Type.” However, we are less than halfway through the book, which resumes with the dialogue between Yurt Makers and Unfamous Author.
Part III picks up the narrative thread with “Redux,” as we continue to follow the adventures of the Ukrainian van, as well as Lefty (so named because it spirals left), the last remaining snail of C. surculus. “Interlude” interrupts the narrative to remind the reader that like a snail, “Fiction is slow to form.” Yet another clinging snail, Reva’s and the narrator’s grandfather is stuck in Kherson and refuses to leave. There is a movie sequence in which the characters are caught up in a Russian propaganda film. Nestia tells the Russian director that “Snails are basically blind anyway, so it doesn’t matter how dark it is. The metaphor’s moot.” The plots thicken and mingle as Yeva manages to find a mate for Lefty: “she had never seen two C. surculus at once…. It didn’t seem possible – surely the doubling was a trick of her vision.” Reva moves from double vision to many tricks up her sleeve in the carnivalesque atmosphere of this film sequence.
The snail’s tale ends with dialogue between Mrs. Brown and Yurt Makers. Mrs. Brown’s identity is concealed and revealing. She is the outspoken activist mother of Sol and Nastia, whom she has abandoned for her secluded life in the United States; she is also the Everywoman in Virginia Woolf’s essay, “Mr. Bennet and Mrs. Brown” who represents the type of character whose life needs to be explored in fiction. Whereas the yurt makers advocate for perfection of pattern and tying loose threads, Mrs. Brown counters with imperfection: “Harmony? I’m with the Persian rug makers on this one. Leave a thread loose.” In many-threaded Endling there is always a loose thread. Nastia holds and heals a wounded Yeva near the end in a return to some degraded Garden of Eden: “Rotten logs, cradles of new life…. Something about nutrient cycling, calcium carried from log to snail shell.” In this novelistic ecosystem Nastia nests and cradles Yeva towards recovery. These rotten logs morph into the Log that the narrator-novelist writes towards the end of Endling. Her question ties and unties another thread of science metafiction: “Am I no better than a snail, sniffing out the softest, most rotten part of a log to feast on?”
“Epilogue: Pasha” suggests that Endling is endless with another thread loosened, another log unentered, another tale untold, and another snail’s tail coiling. One of the captive bachelors, Pasha becomes Paul Gurka interviewed by the CBC. It is an “art talk” bridging understanding, and features his painting of a bridge over a Ukrainian river. He comments that art exists in the liminal space between giver and receiver. From Prologue to Epilogue Reva bridges buildings and rivers in her transnational fantasies and realities where snails cling to girders tenaciously before turning into endlings. The book’s cover highlights Yeva’s van on paths and horizons of war and peace, while on the back cover a snail joins in as trailing trickster of this scientific Ukrainian fable, a reminder of survival of nature’s slowest creature.
LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE
About the Author
MARIA REVA was born in Ukraine and grew up in Canada. Her fiction has appeared in The Atlantic, McSweeney’s, The Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere, earning a National Magazine Award. She also works as an opera librettist. mariareva.ca
About the Reviewer
Michael Greenstein is a retired professor of English (Université de Sherbrooke). He is the author of Third Solitudes: Tradition and Discontinuity in Jewish-Canadian Literature and has published widely on Victorian, Canadian, and American-Jewish literature.
Book Details
ISBN 9780385545310
Published on Jun 03, 2025
Published by Doubleday
Pages 352
Fascinating book. Reva is a writer’s writer. Super review by Greenstein!