Endling – Maria Reva

Three young women, a lone scientist dedicated to saving snails and two sisters who will try any means to win back their mother, have signed up as supposed nubile prizes in a bridal agency for visiting foreigners. The women’s impulsive kidnapping of thirteen bachelors using Yeva’s laboratory van is temerarious enough, but this is Ukraine, it’s February 2022, and as the old vehicle rumbles through the forest, the already off-kilter romance tour is sucker-punched by Russia’s full-scale invasion. And the narrative slides off like the van on winter ice.
 
This is, in effect, what happened to Maria Reva’s novel satirizing the exploitative trade in—allegedly—traditional, submissive Ukrainian brides.  She had to decide, halfway through the story, with the country of her birth suddenly at war, how to continue writing. The book, unsurprisingly, takes a radical turn. The narrative is abandoned, replaced by fictional correspondence between the author and her editor, with a magazine that objects to the gallows humour of an essay when this is precisely faithful to the conversations taking place in Kyiv’s air raid shelters, and a surreal conversation with Yurt Makers. Reva even tosses out a derisory happy ending and an Acknowledgments page, before the original story is taken up again, with the difference that everything has changed.
 
Russian tanks and infantry are streaming towards Ukraine’s major cities, already under aerial bombardment. Meanwhile, Reva still has Yeva and the two sisters with a bunch of foreign men locked in the campervan. And Yeva has a particular obsession with a unique snail for which she seeks a mate, lest it become one more endling. An endling being the very last living example of a species. Yeva, being asexual, knows what it is like to feel the end of a certain evolutionary line. The metaphor of the danger of independent Ukraine being eradicated does not need spelling out.
 
War is a natural habitat for the absurd. As the van lurches from one direction to another, so does the fate and narrative of its characters, including the hopelessly romantic Pasha, one of the trapped bachelors, a native-born Ukrainian who (like Reva, the author) has grown up in Canada.
 
Fragments of memory, or imagined memory, alternative versions of their attempt to rescue a grandfather in besieged Kherson, who refuses to leave his apartment, remind us that this is and can be is no normal storytelling. Is he the grandfather of the two sisters? Or of the owner of the bridal agency? Those who have read about her will know that we are really reading about Maria Reva’s own desperate concern for her own grandfather in that city, bombed and occupied by the Russians, before being liberated, and fighting still for its survival.
 
The changing versions of the story reflect the real uncertainty. What is certain is the women’s “shared blood” and a bond amidst the emergency.