Maria Reva’s Endling is a form-breaking tale of three kinds of survival: the survival of its titular endling, the final specimen of a soon-to-be extinct species of snails; the survival of her Ukrainian characters as Russian attacks envelop their country; and the survival of Reva’s novel itself as that same war upended her story, which she’d started in 2018.
“I had my bachelors being kidnapped in their trailer ready to go,” the debut novelist says, alluding to the first half of the plot, a mail-order brides action tale examining the troubled romance industry. “Then Russia invaded Ukraine and my relatives called from across Ukraine saying they were hearing explosions and I did not know how to continue the book.”
For Reva, a Ukrainian immigrant who grew up in Vancouver, the conundrum ran deeper than her characters’ next steps. She felt guilty for playing with Slavic stereotypes at such a time and guiltier still for being safe and helpless across the ocean from wartime destruction. Adrift in grief and anxiety, she found herself questioning her career.
She wondered: “What do I even do with fiction? What is my role as a writer in these times? How do I keep writing a book when its setting is being destroyed in real time? And can fiction stand up to reality like this?” Ultimately she saw only one way forward for herself and her manuscript. “I decided to put all those questions into the book.”
Metafiction was new to Reva. The Michener graduate wrote out her new draft of the book, then turned tail and yanked out the fourth wall-breaking meditations and self-insertions. Looking at the fractured story then, she finally felt certain that her experimentation wasn’t some gimmick or cop-out – it was an essential part of the story that she could trust readers to understand.
Eventually, within her new framework, the author returned to her original characters, finding that their new set of circumstances opened space to explore different ideas. Yeva, the main character of Reva’s initial narrative, was inspired by a 2019 story in The Atlantic by journalist Ed Yong about a researcher in Hawaii tending to a snail species endling – the devastating official nomenclature for such a creature – and the emotional toll of that work. Reva’s protagonist cares for her endling with funds earned by taking foreign men on romance tours. Depressed by both of these labors, the biologist is holding on by a slimy thread when Russia strikes.
“Before the full invasion of Ukraine she’s probably the least functional character in the book, and then once the invasion strikes, she sprints into action,” Reva explains. “I wanted to explore how different minds function under crisis and sometimes [it’s] the people who are the least functional in peacetime [who] become galvanized into something else with crisis.”
In the face of broader conflict, the scope shifts on Yeva’s conservation work – much like the author found the significance of her own work shifting in response to the same international forces. As the world warped around and within it, Reva’s novel found survival, and led the novelist to consider what fiction’s future is. The novel, in its prototypical form, may be a sort of endling, but fiction, Reva feels, will survive.
“I have the sense sometimes that fiction is just itching to break apart from its seams,” she says. “We actually don’t know how to speak to the situation and where we find ourselves in this world. We have several very rapidly changing wars that are happening. We are living in very uncertain times and I do think fiction is going to restructure itself to reflect that.”
Survival and Redemption: Tales of Intrigue and Deception in Eastern Europe
Saturday, Nov. 8, 3:45pm
Capitol Extension Room E2.016
This article appears in November 7 • 2025.
