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.
Then there’s Pasha, a 30-something mechanical engineer whose family departed Ukraine for Canada when he was 8. He is one of the rare émigrés who returns, joining a romance tour in hopes of finding a dream girl and settling down in his country of origin.
Pasha is one of 13 unlucky bachelors whom Nastia, with the aid of Yeva and Sol, conspires to take hostage for a protest of her own. The women lure the men into the back of the mobile lab and set off on the road with the intention of dumping them in the forest. But it’s the night of Feb. 23, 2022, and Russia has other plans. Soon, the aerial strikes begin. What ensues is a maniacal journey across Ukraine, locked-up bachelors in tow, in a desperate bid for shelter — and a last, very special snail.
There’s another character here who has left: Reva, who appears in the narrative both as her avatar, Masha, and as herself, interrupting the story midway through to watch the war unfold from her privileged vantage in Canada. It’s a hard thing to write about deftly, diasporic pain and privilege, and it’s in some of these passages that Reva’s shining novel, perhaps inevitably, wobbles.
But these passages also introduce the most important figure in “Endling” who stayed: Reva’s grandfather, who has refused to evacuate Kherson, one of the most ruined cities under Russian siege. The author imagines the novel’s characters persuading him to leave his flat. She writes of their appearance on his doorstep in a sequence of repeating chapters, altering the details each time: If only she could write the story just right, maybe he could be saved.
He is the most moving figure in the book — both an intractable presence, forever rooted in Kherson, and a wounding absence, so far from Reva’s life in Canada. I picture him wearing blue.
ENDLING | By Maria Reva | Doubleday | 338 pp. | $28
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