Latest news with #Endling
Washington Post
6 days ago
- Health
- Washington Post
A playfully inventive novel set in Ukraine asks serious questions
Upon an initial reading, Maria Reva's remarkable debut novel, 'Endling,' might be categorized several different ways: a war novel about modern-day Ukraine; a metafictional tale that examines the ethics of writing about conflict and violence; a satirical send-up of the mail-order bride industry in Ukraine; a biologist's quest to save the last remaining snail of a species. Amazingly, 'Endling' is all these things. Reva was born in Ukraine, moved as a child with her family to Canada, and was raised in Vancouver, British Columbia. In 2020, she published a linked story collection, 'Good Citizens Need Not Fear,' about the disparate residents of a decaying building block in the small Ukrainian town of Kirovka in the 1980s. Instead of looking back a few decades, much of 'Endling' animates the devastation of present-day Ukraine since the Russian invasion on Feb. 24, 2022. At the novel's onset, the reader meets Yeva, a renegade biologist who is trying to save a snail named Lefty (hence 'Endling,' a term used to describe the last survivor of a dying species). Not surprisingly, Yeva prefers snails to the company of humans. She lives in a battered RV, which also doubles as her mobile lab. Reva writes: 'Snails! There'd been a time when she would tell anyone who'd listen how amazing these creatures were. How the many gastropod species have evolved to live anywhere on the planet, from deserts to deep ocean trenches. How they have gills to live in water, or have lungs to live on land — some, like the apple snail, possess one of each, to withstand both monsoons and droughts.' Yeva meets Nastia and Sol, sisters who are working for the same 'romance tour' (a euphemism for a mail-order bridal business), and moonlights for them to fund her ongoing snail research. The young women are looking for their mother, a radical activist who used to fight 'against many evils, particularly the international bridal industry.' As part of this effort, Nastia hatches a plan to kidnap a band of bachelors, hoping that potential media coverage of the exploit will attract their mother's attention. Invoking the spirit of Herman Melville's 'Moby-Dick,' Reva writes about Nastia's feelings for Yeva's RV: 'Every time she saw the thing — lumbering, white, speckled with rust — she felt a tinge of relief mixed with excitement. It seemed to grow larger every time she saw it, a great whale about to swallow a hundred men whole. It was the key to her plan.' This is one of the reader's first hints that this narrative is tipping toward epic proportions and has no intentions of staying constrained within traditional narrative conventions. Soon, Russia invades — and the novel we've been reading up to this point is interrupted. In Part II, the reader is introduced to the first-person voice of author Maria Reva. She is struggling to write her first novel in her parents' attic in Canada, and her agent, Rufus Redpen (ha!), is touching base about the manuscript, which is well past overdue. 'My words drag along, on the verge of falling apart, but isn't this precarious place where true Art lives?' Reva writes. After she attempts to describe the novel, Redpen responds that the project sounds like merely 'a bunch of yurts,' or 'hobbled nubs of narrative, barely connected.' Then, 'Endling' swerves into an interview between an 'Unfamous Author' and 'Yurt Makers.' 'What right do I have to write about the war from my armchair?' the author says. 'And to keep writing about the mail-order bride industry seems even worse. Dredge up that cliché? In these times? Anyway, am I even a real Ukrainian?' Throughout these meta forays, the author raises more and more questions. Though Reva doesn't answer all these questions, she tests the boundaries of storytelling with freshness and humor despite the bleak subject matter. A variety of voices, forms and ideas spring forth with a playful inventiveness: a correspondence between a magazine editor and the author, a completed grant application, more interviews, meeting minutes. In another author's hands, these departures might be experienced as digressions, draining suspense and power from the story, but Reva they alchemizes them into something between imagination and reality, an original way to investigate the artifice of the novel — its limitations but also its expansiveness. There may have been a few moments when this reader stumbled over the disparate narrative strategies, but ultimately it's easy to be won over by a novel that includes writing from a snail's point of view. 'Endling,' original as it is, did evoke other reading experiences: the survivalist adventure of Octavia Butler's classic 'The Parable of the Sower,' the sly satire of Percival Everett's 'Erasure,' the poetic inventions of Dana Spiotta's 'Stone Arabia' and 'Wayward.' Reva places her metaphorical arms around all of it — with the intention of using language to express the inexpressible: senseless violence, loneliness, extreme suffering and grief. Near the beginning of 'Endling,' Reva writes about the bond between Yeva and a fellow conservationist: 'For comfort, for reassurance that, despite setbacks, their labs still offered the snails a higher chance of survival than the wild. They needed each other to bear witness, because the rest of the world didn't.' In the end, this may be the fulfilled purpose of Reva's wildly inventive novel: to bear witness. S. Kirk Walsh is a book critic whose work has appeared in the New York Times and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among other places, and the author of the novel 'The Elephant of Belfast.' By Maria Reva Doubleday. 338 pp. $28
Los Angeles Times
6 days ago
- Politics
- Los Angeles Times
Fake brides have their own agenda in Ukraine native's heart-stopping ‘Endling'
Maria Reva creates beautiful, purposeful chaos. Informed by deep personal loss, her startling metafictional debut novel, 'Endling,' is a forceful mashup of storytelling modes that call attention to its interplay of reality and fiction — a Ukrainian tragicomedy of errors colliding with social commentary about the Russian invasion. A poorly planned crime serves as the anchor. 'Endling' throws three strangers involved with Ukraine's for-profit international matchmaking market together for a quixotic kidnapping caper in a nation on the brink of war. There's a twisted, postmodern 'Canterbury Tales'-like quality to these proceedings: Like medieval pilgrims, its central characters are each on a journey they hope will change their lives. And everyone is suffering some level of delusion. If 'Endling' has a main character, it's the woman whose mission is to save the nation's endangered snails; another key player is a lone wolf terrorist who hopes her political orchestrations will spark a family reunion. Then there's the lonely, disaffected expatriate bachelor on the hunt for a quiet, traditional wife. Through their perspectives, black humor flows freely, as the motivations and experiences that brought this motley crew together rise to the surface. Context is crucial in 'Endling.' These characters cross paths early in 2022, when mass violence threatens to overwhelm every other concern. But despite the amassing of Russian troops on the border, the military invasion of Ukraine seems so surreal that no one knows what to believe or how much to fear. So these quests march on even as the crack of explosions grows louder. The stories that emerge about our three key players are evocative, provocative and absurd — a contrast to looming darkness. Between those narratives, there are commentaries about the history and politics of Ukraine and on publishing and writing about Ukraine, plus the author's family and its plight at the time of the book's writing. As Reva, a native of Ukraine, writes in an early, epistolary section, in response to a magazine editor's critique of the irreverence of her solicited essay about the war: 'You'd asked for the type of reporting/response that would differ from that of a non-Ukrainian. In Ukraine, dark humor dates back to the Soviet days, giving people who live in uncontrollable circumstances a sense of power. If you can laugh about a dark reality, you rise above it, etc.' No story better exemplifies that ethos than that of the teenage fake bride turned kidnapper who aches for her mother. Young, beautiful Nastia (a.k.a. Anastasia) — just 18 years old and six months past high school graduation — brings the group together. Ostensibly to stop the exploitation of women, this daughter of a fierce feminist activist who has long protested the tourist marriage market resolves to make an unforgettable public statement by kidnapping 100 male clients of the matchmaking service 'Romeo and Yulia' at the start of one of its romance tours. Though the stunt is nominally aimed at exposing and ending degrading matchmaking practices, what Nastia really yearns for is her missing parent's attention. When Nastia decides that a mobile trailer van in the guise of an escape room would be the perfect means of the men's abduction, she begs Yeva, a fellow bride in possession of an RV, to rent it to her. Like Nastia, Yeva is a 'bride' with an agenda. A scientist who's lost her grant funding, Yeva uses the marriage mart grift to sustain her life's work. Her story exemplifies the mercenary nature of the international marriage market. While Romeo and Yulia's 'brides,' as the women are called, aren't paid a salary, they regularly receive gifts from suitors. In exchange for allowing the agency to use her as 'shimmering bait' on the website, women like Yeva 'could also return tour after tour and, without bending any rules, make decent money. In fact, the agency endorsed the practice: any gifts ordered by bachelors through the agency — gym membership, cooking class, customizable charm bracelet — could be redeemed by the brides for cash from the agency office.' Yeva's story gives the novel a melancholy moral center. And it's from Yeva's quest that the book derives its title: An 'endling' is the last individual in a dying species, the kind she is dedicated to protecting. After losing access to institutional support, Yeva equipped the trailer as a roaming laboratory and storage site where (at the peak) she sustained over 270 species of rare gastropods. Though she prefers mollusks to men, it's Yeva who insists on reducing the kidnapping target from 100 to 12, a number that the trailer could humanely accommodate. Pasha, one of the men Nastia lures to the trailer, has his own ambitions. Born in Ukraine and raised in Canada, Pasha's secret is that he doesn't plan to return to the West with his bride like the other clients. Instead, he fantasizes about resettling in the Ukraine and forging a life that might command the respect he craves from his parents. Pasha is the sympathetic face of Western men beguiled by nostalgia for 'traditional' wives unsullied by feminism and high expectations. His motives are sincere even if his relationship with women and his family might be better served through therapy. 'Endling' isn't an easy read, but it is brilliant and heart-stopping. Authorial interludes can feel like interruptions, but by breaking the fourth wall, Reva forces us to pay attention to the ongoing devastation behind the narrative while unpacking the compromises of storytelling. Plus, Yeva, Nastia and Pasha and the merchants of romance spin their own fictions: They have trouble telling the difference between truth and make-believe even as the sounds of war grow near and even when bullets penetrate flesh. This building up and breaking down of artifice forces reflection on how we use fiction to explore and bend reality while undermining the comforts of distance. As the author confesses, 'I need to keep fact and fiction straight, but they keep blurring together.' Bell is a critic and media researcher exploring culture, politics and identity in art.
