In the daytime, as I walk down Vancouver's tree-lined streets, where the crocuses are in full bloom, I squint at the bright clear skies, wondering if one day all this, too, will turn into a burning wreckage. Riding the bus, I startle at a caved-in building, reminding myself that unlike every other caved-in building on the news and in my nightmares, this one has simply been bulldozed. My sister, who also lives in Vancouver, tells me that when she passes freshly dug mounds for flower beds, she sees mass graves. Sometimes I wonder if she and I are going insane, living two realities at once — the explosions peppering phone calls from Ukraine alongside the dinner parties in Vancouver with laughing, smiling friends in wrinkle-free fabrics who don't mention the war. Maybe there is no war, as conspiracy theorists whisper online. Maybe it's all in my head?
Endling, by Maria Reva, is postmodernist madcap set in contemporary Ukraine. Initially quirky in its characters and premise, a third of the way through the novel abruptly breaks off to examine its authorship and context. From there, it snowballs into absurdity.
Who peoples the main narrative thread?
Yeva: Malacologist. "Romance tour" work (the Romeo Meets Yulia agency is essentially an in-person mail-order bride service, serving aging, balding Western men) finances her mobile lab, where she documents and preserves snail species, with a fondness for endlings (last of their species). Asexual.
Kevin: Fellow snail conservationist based in Hawaii, in love with Yeva.
Nastia: Another "bride" at the agency, achingly young and beautiful, with major mommy issues. Devises a plot to kidnap a group of bachelors, ostensibly to take down the bridal industry machine, but mostly to get her mother's attention.
Sol: Interpreter in the employ of the romance tour but paired exclusively with her sister Nastia, so she acts as filter, chaperone, unheeded voice of reason.
Iolanta: Nastia and Sol's absent mother. "Pioneer. Performance artist. Crazy. Sextremist." Think: Pussy Riot.
Pasha: Ukrainian-Canadian disappointment to his parents. An engineer, not an artist, pursuing the idea of a homeland he never knew, hoping to find a Ukrainian bride with whom to build a quiet, traditional life.
While other immigrants steered their offspring into practical careers like medicine and accounting, his parents, from his early days, scrunched their noses at all that. They did not leave everything they knew back in Ukraine, they did not traverse the roiling Atlantic just so their son could suffer the same boring engineering jobs they'd endured, and their own parents had endured. No, Pasha would transcend pragmatism, become a Deep Thinker.
Lefty: A rare snail specimen, C. surculus, not a hermaphrodite, with a shell spiraling left, rendering breeding impossible with 99% of his species.
The yurt makers: A Greek chorus of sense and wisdom and cryptic truths and allusions appearing in the second half of the book. "The world is a whore," they say.
When we first meet Yeva, she's living out of the same van where she keeps her ever-dwindling collection of specimens; she's still in emotional recovery from losing species due to contaminated lettuce and then a further lab slipup. Yeva agrees to the use of her van in Nastia's scheme, and one night, after the tour's scheduled activities, a select group of bachelors file into the vehicle. It is the early hours of February 24, 2022. Nastia's plan had no contingency for Putin bombing Kyiv that day.
And then in Part II, the novel ends. The "end matter" includes correspondence between the author and publisher, a grant application, (how can one go on writing fiction in these circumstances?), acknowledgements ("I would also like to thank Russia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs for including my name on their sanctions list of Canadians who are now forbidden from entering their country, one of the biggest honors of my literary career"), and a note on the typography (Serifus Libris, "conceived as a private handkerchief embroidery type" by an entirely fictional engraver, who did not invent Scrabble; this may be my favourite section of the book.)
Part III resumes the main narrative thread, kind of. That is, the author works through some possible scenarios. While I'm not one to dismiss experimental fiction, I found the break from the traditional narrative hugely interrupted the pacing. For the remaining half of the book, the brakes were already on and my interest was grinding to a halt.
The future had been a luxury. The future didn't exist anymore.
Despite its flaws, it's a charming novel. It manages to be funny during wartime. I was rooting for the entire cast. I'm still rooting for Ukraine! Endling is a reader favourite in this year's Tournament of Books.
See also
Article: How One Snail Inspired Two Novels on Two Different Continents
Podcast: Snail Sex Tape
And behold! This amazing bit of pâte-sur-pâte porcelain work I came across in an antique shop a couple of months ago. I am in thrall to this late 19th-century piece, not least because of its weird subject matter. Unexpectedly, the aforementioned Snail Sex Tape shed some light on the symbolism that might lie behind it.
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