She's a Snail Hunter, a Mail-Order Bride and a Kidnapper
ENDLING, by Maria Reva
'States of Mind,' a 1911 triptych by the artist Umberto Boccioni, is a haunting meditation on leaving and being left. The first painting, 'The Farewells,' is a splintered composition of travelers and their loved ones at a train station. The second is 'Those Who Go,' in which disembodied visages are carried away by rushes of diagonal lines. The last one, 'Those Who Stay,' captures the remaining figures, faceless and hunched with grief amid attenuated vertical slashes. Throughout, the predominant colors are shades of blue.
Maria Reva's startling and ambitious whirlwind of a debut novel, 'Endling,' involves soon-to-be-extinct animal species, the worst European terrestrial conflict since World War II and the spectacularly mismatched participants of the international marriage industry. But as much as it is a bleakly funny novel of climate change, manmade horror and tectonic cultural shifts, 'Endling' is also a diasporic novel — a sadder, bluer story, set in Ukraine on the brink of war, about those who go and those who stay.
Those who stayed: The biblically named Yeva (Eve, in English), the first character we encounter in this metafictional four-part narrative, who is obsessed with scouring every corner of Ukraine to find the endlings, or last known members, of threatened snail species. She collects them in jars in her 'mobile lab,' an RV she has painstakingly retrofitted with specialized equipment.
Asexual, misunderstood, strange and growingly suicidal, Yeva also happens to be powerfully beautiful. She finances her increasingly doomed scientific efforts by enrolling as a 'bride' in 'romance tours' organized by a marriage boutique called Romeo Meets Yulia. Yeva isn't expected to actually marry any of the Western bachelors flown into Ukraine for these matchmaking events, and acts only as 'shimmering bait.'
Yeva encounters a fellow bride named Nastia, an 'orphan-thin' girl of 18 ('and a half'), and her older sister, Sol, who is less conventionally attractive of the two but has studied English and serves as Nastia's interpreter. None of the women have ever traveled beyond Ukraine's borders.
Those who left: Iolanta Cherno, Nastia and Sol's mother, who ran a notorious Pussy Riot–esque protest troupe targeting sex tourism before she took off for parts unknown eight months ago. There's also Maria, or Masha, who is the founder of Romeo Meets Yulia and, like the author herself, is a Ukraine-born writer living near Vancouver.
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