The Knot

Early morning, February 24, 2022. A white RV leaves Kyiv. In the cab are three women: Anastasia, barely out of adolescence; her older sister, Solomiya; and Yeva, who has dedicated her life to snail conservation. In the back, squeezed between refrigerators and lab equipment, are thirteen men in cheap tuxedos, Westerners who have come to Ukraine looking for an approximation of love. They don’t know they have been kidnapped, just as the women don’t know about the Russian tanks pouring across the border ahead. When the first missiles explode, the travellers wonder if they hear fireworks. Within a few days, one of their number will be dead, one will be grievously injured, and one will have been reborn as a national hero.

Anastasia and Solomiya are the daughters of Iolanta, a legendary feminist activist and the founder of Komod (a lightly fictionalized version of the women’s rights organization FEMEN). When Iolanta suddenly cuts off all contact with them, they decide to earn a living by participating in “romance tours” for Western men interested in marrying Ukrainian women — precisely the kind of thing Iolanta has spent her life protesting. In a bid to lure their mother back into their lives, they decide to kidnap a group of bachelors. To do this, they enlist Yeva, who has done many tours herself to fund her mission of rescuing critically endangered species: “endlings” that are the last of their kind. The sisters need her trailer-lab to pull off the scheme. Yeva, whose life is going about as well as those of her dwindling population of gastropods, agrees.

The bachelors are mostly what you’d expect (bald, bloviating, business-minded) except for Pasha, a hopeless thirtysomething whose family left Ukraine for Canada in the ’90s. Scrolling the Instagram accounts of relatives back in the old country, Pasha concludes that life would be easier in Europe. But after a few weeks in Kyiv, following a romance tour that has, despite his eligibility (“engineer, full head of hair”), ended in failure, he is invited by a fellow bachelor to join a secret, exclusive getaway hosted by some of the brides. Anastasia has cooked up this mysterious ruse to facilitate the kidnapping, and although Pasha is not initially chosen as one of the victims, his ability to understand Ukrainian and speak Russian will become essential to everyone involved.

This is the initial set‑up of Maria Reva’s Endling, but the novel takes a turn. We are lifted out of the story and find ourselves in the author’s parents’ attic in British Columbia, listening to a metafictional phone conversation between her and her literary agent. They’re discussing her manuscript when an email pops up with a picture of an apartment building blown apart by a Russian rocket. “Panic floods me: it’s my aunt and uncle’s building in Kyiv,” she thinks, before looking more closely at the image. “No, the metal entrance doors are painted a different color from my aunt and uncle’s. The tragedy passed on to another family.”

The bridal industry caper fades into the background as Reva describes the phantasmagorical quality of living through war at a remove. There are the usual things: the nagging pointlessness of going about life when her grandfather’s city is being reduced to rubble, the constant sense of whiplash and dislocation, the fear, the relief, the guilt. But there is also the absurdity of writing under these conditions, perhaps best captured by an editor who expresses disappointment in an essay she submitted about how Ukrainians were using humour to survive the invasion. “We were hoping,” he writes, “for your perspective as a Ukrainian expatriate watching the horror unfold from abroad (gentle emphasis on horror).” She also has complicated feelings about the sudden interest in her previous collection of stories, published in 2020 and initially overshadowed by the pandemic, which is now “relevant.” Reva explores these feelings through an interior dialogue with a collective of imaginary yurt makers (long story). “Who could’ve known that your best publicist would be Mr. Putin himself,” they say, needling her about her insecurities. How Ukrainian is she, really? How much does she love her grandfather, who stubbornly refuses to leave Kherson? Is this all just content to her?

The postmodern confessional irruption is electrifying. This is what it’s like: the loneliness, the guilt so large and complex it cannot be mapped in Euclidean space (you’re lucky to not be there, you’re ashamed to not be there, you wish it would stop so you could be happy again). Unfortunately, it is only a few dozen pages before we are back in the trailer with Anastasia, Solomiya, Yeva, and Pasha, the plot lurching into a series of mad stunts that read a bit like a P. G. Wodehouse take on Elem Klimov’s film Come and See. Throughout the book, Reva turns to comedy and hysterical realism to drive home the fact that wars happen to ordinary people. Such an approach demands a lot of a writer’s style, and hers too often falls short of the mark. Her overreliance on rhetorical questions, her fondness for redundancies, and her tendency to overexplain are a lethal drag on the narrative:

Yeva would steer a wayward child onto the right side of the law, change her life, possibly save it. Wasn’t this what people did to feel good? Help other humans, a supposedly higher cause than helping nonhumans? Legacy, Yeva thought. Help a child find direction, become a mentor. Legacy — not in the field Yeva wanted, but who was she to choose?

Every character’s internal monologue sounds like this, and these tics bedevil even the most climactic moments. When she gets out of her own way and simply tells the story, Reva lands some fantastic lines. But they end up feeling like scraps of melody lost in radio static.

Such shortcomings are forgotten in the scenes where the author is speaking directly to the reader. I can understand why a writer based in Canada might be chary of coming across as self-indulgent, penning a whole novel about her own experience when there’s a war going on back home. But the missiles keep falling — on Ukraine, on Gaza, on Syria and Yemen and Sudan — and millions around the world now check their phones every morning with their hearts in their throats. The rage and powerlessness of the observer are among the defining experiences of the digital age, and they would, I think, be worthy of the full attention of a novelist as honest and inventive as Reva.