Maria Reva’s debut novel, Endling is immensely ambitious and credit where credit is due this is a vast, sweeping novel that rocked me to my core in its first few chapters.
Rating: 🌟🌟
Genre: War fiction, Ukraine, Metafiction, Literary Fiction.
Publisher: Virago (Hachette UK)
Review in one word: Confounding
Goddamnit I really wanted to love this book so much…I really did.
All of the ingredients were there! A lone female protagonist who cares deeply for endangered mollusc species. Driving through Ukraine and looking to mate molluscs together to prevent them being “Endlings” in other words the final individuals of their species.
Maria Reva’s debut novel, Endling is immensely ambitious and credit where credit is due this is a vast, sweeping novel that rocked me to my core in its first few chapters.
It’s set against the harrowing backdrop of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Yeva lives in a mobile laboratory, dedicating her solitary existence to collecting and sheltering endangered snails. Her most prized possession is Lefty, the last known individual of his species—an “endling”.
To fund her strange mission, Yeva works for a Canadian firm specialising in “romance tours” to Ukraine, a euphemism for the mail-order bride business. Through this work that Yeva crosses paths with two other women entangled in the romance industry: the stunning Nastia and her brilliant sister Sol, daughters of a famous feminist activist who has mysteriously vanished. Disheartened by her inability to save the snails and desperate for a way out, Yeva is drawn into Nastia’s audacious plan to abduct a dozen of the foreign men who have come to Kyiv in search of wives.
Endling tackles profoundly difficult themes of our time – war, extinction, the trafficking and exploitation of women and does this in a confronting and emotionally raw way.
There are self-conscious moments in this that I thought were totally unnecessary and cringey. The novel shifts back and forth in time in a jarring way and in some parts Reva herself narrates in the first person. This distracts from the story itself and slows it down massively. There’s also the not inconsequential thing of having 12 grown men jammed into a tiny van being driven around Ukraine for days to weeks at a time. Apparently none of the guys were aware of there being a war happening outside the van. Nobody mentions needing to go to the loo in the novel but this seemed like too much of an obvious omission. How on earth would this situation occur in reality?
I wanted so badly to love this novel but it seems to get bogged down in its own meta-narrative style. Hugely ambitious and filled with glorious moments of genius writing, I just wish Reva had made it simpler to follow and it would have been far more enjoyable.
Content Catnip 