Some questions have been hounding me lately: In times of war and devastation, how do artists carry on? How much of a culture can diasporic descendants lay claim to? If a tree snail and I were both granted immortality on the condition that I will die if and only if the snail touches me — and the snail is tirelessly searching — what would I do? Safe to say they all take up equal space in my brain. Luckily, Maria Reva’s book “Endling” tackles two of the three. And runs parallel to that last one. (Okay, not exactly. But there are snails!)
“Endling” follows Yeva, a traveling snail scientist, and sisters Soliyama and Nastia, daughters of a recently missing famous activist. An activist who protested the very Ukrainian marriage agency that all three women participate in. Soon, Pasha, a Ukraine-born Canadian man, flies to Kyiv for a so-called romance tour, looking for a perfect mail-order bride to help him reconnect with the severed culture of his parents (he imagines a plain Ukrainian woman for himself, giving her a common name of Tanya, Olya or Anya). Desperate to make headlines and gain their missing mother’s attention, Nastia and Sol hire the disillusioned Yeva to hold 12 foreign suitors hostage in her RV-turned-snail lab. The three women set off with their bachelors (plus Pasha) in tow. Then the first bomb falls on the city, and the novel splits itself open.
I won’t pretend that I completely bought into the novel from the get-go. The characters call upon a specific breed of literary fiction: with motivations and backstories explicitly spelled out, with occupations just eccentric enough to spike interest. The beginning had me ready to endure a novel of painfully eccentric characters, which is why the metafictional turn in the second part is so exhilarating. In Part II, Reva takes us from third to first person; we read transcripts, emails, applications and illustrations. The conflation of Reva’s experience writing the novel with the fabric of the book itself lends her the space to stop the action of the characters and absorb the shock waves of the war on Ukraine in seemingly real time. We are able to zoom out and see its impacts beyond the characters, even to the author of the novel. The fourth wall break is sobering, funny and gripping.
When we return to the characters, it’s with renewed force, desperation and urgency. While author Reva grapples with the feeling of superficiality that comes with writing fiction about a country that is actively being devastated by an external aggressor, character Yeva struggles to find the point in attempting to rescue “endling” snails — the last of their kind — when the world seems so determined to watch or, worse, ignore the species as it peters out. The meshing of the two storylines, as well as the tone switch because of the war, takes the characters that initially are maybe a little too out there and pressure cooks them, making them much more dynamic and resonant in the process.
Reva also depicts the struggle with the uncomfortable demand for her work — specifically, the demand for the identity behind it, regardless of what Reva wants to write — due to the ongoing and globally conspicuous destruction of Ukraine. Pasha takes on this role on the novel side, cravenly navigating his severed cultural heritage and the artistic capital it provides. Reva’s portrayal of Pasha is unforgiving, painting him as hungry for a land he knows little of, eager to use his homecoming for personal fulfillment. This is evident even as early as his participation in the romance tour, where he seeks to resolve the complexities of his origins with a wedding. Despite this, Reva can’t help speaking through his Western perspective jolted by his experience of the invasion. Pasha demands something other than platitudes from his audience when he presents them with the art of a suffering people, and Reva follows suit. The meshing of these two layers, Reva’s critical look at her own perspective of her homeland, is what pushes the novel’s themes toward the fascinating web Reva leaves you with.
It’s a guilt-ridden spiral, one only deepened by Reva’s entanglement with her characters. The novel asks what it means for a species of snail, a lonely scientist and even 12 men trapped in an RV, to consider themselves an endling. But Reva also asks what it means for a country and its inhabitants to be staring down the same fate. The push and pull of characters’ personal fulfillment with the imminent destruction of the world as they know it swells and thrives in these pages. What does it mean for diasporic descendants to simply watch from another homeland, and what does it mean to stubbornly stay, holding onto the last dredges of a crumbling city? “Endling” nimbly balances its wider scope with its smallest, shell-bound characters. It spins itself around and phases through its walls. Reva begs you, if not to help, then to care. If not to love, then to hate. To give all “endlings” something — an identity, a person, an expression — to grasp onto when they are eventually left to face the vast world alone. Because what really matters when your lease on immortality is up, and it’s just you and that tree snail?
Daily Arts Writer Cora Rolfes can be reached at corolfes@umich.edu.
