Beyond the many constraints of fiction

Loss runs through the pages of Maria Reva’s debut novel, Endling, coursing through until, what has been till then a conventional story, cracks open, and her characters are flung out of the constraints of fiction and into something more sublime.

Long-listed for the Booker this year, Endling begins just before the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The main character is Yeva, a scientist who is trying to propagate endangered snail species around the country in her specially fitted-out mobile lab.

That lab is dedicated to helping the gastropod survive — and after years of relying on government and NGO grants that had become increasingly scarce, a serendipitous encounter at a gas station with a woman who organises “romance tours” for lovesick bachelors looking for beautiful wives in Ukraine becomes an unlikely source of funding for Yeva. It turns out to be a job like any other.

Why snails, though? As Reva describes it in one of many evocative passages in the book, they are more than just something that is “A crunch under the boot. A speck to flick off a lettuce leaf.” They “weren’t pandas — those oversize bumbling toddlers that sucked up national conservation budgets — or any of the other charismatic megafauna, like orcas or gorillas.” But Yeva doesn’t love them because of the gastropod’s role as “barometers of a biome’s health”. It is because: “She could spend hours watching them in their terrariums, hours while her own mind slowed, slowed, emptied.”

Yeva is also harbouring another secret, one she can’t quite communicate to her mother, who’d rather see her married off: she’s asexual, with zero interest in settling down in a conventional marriage and procreating. (The irony of Yeva’s desperate attempts to breed endangered snails, especially Lefty, whose shell spirals leftwards — a rarity among gastropods, while she ignores her own family’s demands might have been a bit too on the nose in the hands of a less talented author, but Reva doesn’t belabour the point.)

Five years into working on the romance tours while carrying out her conservation activities, Yeva experiences a catastrophic loss of the snails she’d been rescuing, almost all of them the last of their species, the endlings. It is then, as she contemplates ending it all, that she encounters another member of the romance tour, Nastia and her sister Sol, who works as an interpreter slash chaperone on dates. Nastia wants Yeva’s help to kidnap a group of foreign tourists, the bachelors, in a harebrained attempt at luring her mother, Iolanta, out of wherever she’s been hiding. 

A left spiralling snail, a spiralling and suicidal biologist, an abandoned daughter desperately looking for her mother, and thirteen lovelorn men who’d been hoping to find the perfect, feminine wife in a country about to be invaded by its powerful neighbour: a lot is going on in Endling. Tragicomic would be the perfect description for what ensues as this motley crew careens around a country being bombed by the Russians. But that description pales when that sudden flip halfway through the book happens — that’s Reva’s grief and anger at seeing her ancestral homeland subject to war and violence, and her attempt at shaking the complacency out of the reader. War, bloody and brutal, cannot be part of ordinary fiction. Hence, the metafictional turn and the reader gets Reva’s fictional alter-ego, herself attempting to write a novel about a biologist trying to save snails and the ludicrousness of it, the obsession with something so small against the backdrop of global geopolitics, the vast difference in scale, is what tilts this book off its axis and why it’s been getting the acclaim it has (and deserves).

It would have been easy for Reva to turn the kidnapped bachelors into figures of fun, but she gives each of these lonely men searching for connection backstories and wounds that make them deeply human. 

As for the snail that could be the saviour of his species? Let’s say the encounter between two gastropods that Reva describes towards the end perfectly encapsulates her triumph as a writer here: it’s poetic, it stirs the human reader’s heart, and it shows how, even when disaster looms, and hope has all but vanished, life will find a way to go on.