Maria Reva’s first novel, Endling (Doubleday, 2025), follows three women posing as mail-order brides in Ukraine—a scientist desperate to save snails from the brink of extinction and two activists searching for their mother. They team up to protest the Romance Tours by kidnapping a dozen Western bachelors in a mobile snail laboratory. The plan is absurd; they’re doing it anyway. But when Russia begins its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the novel upends—just like the characters’ lives, just like life outside the novel. The author herself—or is it?—interrupts the narrative to send the trio on a hopeless mission to rescue her own grandfather. Endling is a structural and metafictional adventure that interrogates the impossible question of how to write about war.
Reva and I talked over video about structural play, narrative power, and how the violence and uncertainty of today’s world must reflect in the upheaval of the novel—both hers specifically and the form as it exists for other writers. Like many of my interactions these days, the conversation began with a few grim jokes about the political climate, not only the situation between Russia and Ukraine but between the United States and Canada. That made for a natural, if ominous, transition into Endling.
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The Rumpus: There’s dark humor in the book itself. Is that particularly Ukrainian? How does humor operate in Endling?
Maria Reva: Humor makes the darkness more digestible. Maybe it’s more of an outcome than a tool. It’s how I process the world and regurgitate it on the page. If I approached a harrowing scene thinking, “I need to make this funny,” it would fall flat.
As for the flavor of humor of the book, I’m not sure what percentage is a general Ukrainian sensibility and what’s specific to my family. Yeva and Nastia have a pretty direct, sometimes brusque, way of interacting with each other and others. That strikes me as very Ukrainian.
Ukraine has a difficult history, and humor is a coping mechanism. If you can laugh about a difficult situation, laugh in your aggressor’s face, it gives you a sense of power.
There were so many jokes during the Soviet Union. For instance, how the Soviet version of hell was better than the American one—you don’t have to haul as much excrement thanks to the shortage of buckets. Humor was how people tried to rise above harsh circumstances and take away their power.
Rumpus: Do you mean dignity or bodily remove?
Reva: Dignity. If you are joking, you are seeing something from a meta lens. So, you are distancing yourself from it in some way. I used to be 100 percent for humor but I’ve grown more suspicious of it lately. It can be a numbing tool.
For example, what’s happening in the States right now. Some people are turning Trump’s rhetoric about Canada-as-fifty-first-state into a joke. But we need to feel the power of a statement like that because it’s very close to how Putin talked about Ukraine leading up to various stages of aggression. How the border is supposedly artificial, illegitimate, that all Ukrainians want to be part of Russia, all sorts of falsehoods. Trump is saying Canadians want to be part of the US, that it would help our economy and security, that we’re basically one people because of our shared language and history. Erasing that divide.
But at the start of our conversation, I made a joke about an American invasion myself.
Rumpus: Does it matter who makes the jokes?
Reva: Yes, who is saying it and, in whose interest, it is to downplay it. As Canadians, sure, we can joke about it, as long as it’s coupled with real action.
Rumpus: How does art play into that?
Reva: That’s something I’ve been grappling with since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. There’s fast action like going to protests, giving money where it’s needed. Then there’s slower action that doesn’t have an immediate impact, such as retreating to work on a book. There is guilt. I tried to do what I could, but I did need to retreat to write this book.
Now that it’s coming out, I hope I can humanize Ukrainians, so they’re not just a headline or a number. They’re real people. And also show that what’s happening there could happen to us here in Canada.
Rumpus: Endling has these metafictional and also graphical and structural intrusions. They strike me as a way to puncture the narrative, so it bleeds into the outside world.
Reva: A lot of writers now are grappling with how to write fiction in such a rapidly changing world. Much like the World Wars changed the course of art and thinking about art.
I have this theory that the novel has become ossified. We’ve almost perfected it to a formula by this point—inciting incident, climax, etc.—and it wasn’t always like that.
I read an interview of Salvador Plascencia, whose book The People of Paper inspired the fake ending in mine. His book has this typographical wizardry with columns side by side to show different perspectives happening simultaneously. In the interview, Plascencia said he was inspired by the proto-novel, which had a wilder, shape-shifting quality. He was trying to get back to that.
I think the novel is itching to be ripped apart again, which is why metafictional narratives are becoming more common. There’s also the deep uncertainty we’re facing. We write into it by reshaping the novel through structural play and structural uncertainties.
Rumpus: Let’s talk about how that happens in Endling. We have graphic elements—the drawings, the end matter that appears in the middle. We have chapters as screenplay dialogue or memos.
Reva: The drawings of the collapsing building were taken directly from my first book, Good Citizens Need Not Fear. In that book, it’s structural damage due to a renovation. But when the war broke out, several people sent me photos of hit buildings that collapsed the same way as in that illustration. It was very disturbing.
The fake ending is the fictionalized author giving up on the book and ending it prematurely. What I wanted to do. End the goddamn thing, be done with it. But readers are smarter than that. Our minds are narrative machines and know when an ending comes too early. When I watched Everything Everywhere All At Once, nobody walked out of the theater when the movie ends the first time. It’s a fake ending and everyone senses it.
I deleted all the metafictional stuff and end matter during one of the drafts because I wasn’t sure about it. But I put it back in, remembering what Zsuzsi Gartner said in an interview in National Post: “I’d rather go down in flames, quite frankly, then have a nice little book. I’d rather go down screaming in flames. You can quote me on that.”
Rumpus: What about the different narrative forms?
Reva: Those felt imperative to me. In addition to prose, I write opera libretti. Every time, I have to ask myself, does this story have to be an opera? Is it a play? A novel? Is the music really needed? Otherwise, the opera flops. I asked that on a chapter-to-chapter basis when writing Endling. Is this the right medium for this content?
Rumpus: My favorite is when Yeva, Nastia, and Sol realize their country is being attacked. We get their reaction in the form of meeting notes. It feels surreal, as trauma often does. It also looks at an overpowering thing in a way that is calm.
Reva: At first, it was a craft decision. The scene was initially written the standard way, paragraph after paragraph, lots of dialogue, but it didn’t work. The characters had to do a lot of logistical planning in a short time, take different factors into account, such as the direction of troop and tank movement, whether urban or rural areas were safer, advice from relatives all over the country. All while the bachelors are knocking on the trailer walls. The dialogue got unwieldy, people were cutting each other off, and it started to feel like, well, a meeting. So, I thought, let’s flesh it out it as a memo with bullet points.
Then the craft decision became an artistic one. The emotion of the moment bleeds into the bullet points. The chaos seeps into the attempted order. Both the order I attempted as a writer and the order the characters try to maintain.
I also wanted to explore how different minds work during cataclysm. What forms panic can take, but also how the mind can become like a needle, pure focus. It’s Yeva’s idea to get Sol to take notes, Yeva who calms both sisters down. In Part 1, she’s the least functional character, but when the full-scale invasion breaks out, she turns into the functional one.
Rumpus: These moments, along with the fictionalized author poking in, make Endling feel like a book about writing, about how to make meaning.
Reva: It’s pulling back the curtain. Writing a book is messy. Before you see it between glossy covers, there’s doubt and rewriting and rethinking and thinking you’re a fraud and then thinking you’re the greatest.
Rumpus: I love that you put those doubts right in the book. Does that feel vulnerable?
Reva: It does feel vulnerable. But it feels like the only way I could keep writing it.
Writing into the mail order bride trope already felt uncomfortable. Since the 90s there’s been this association between Slavic women and the derogatory term “mail order bride.” I wanted to dig into those stereotypes and what it does to a woman to be perceived that way. I wanted to create an anti-mail order bride novel.
But when the full-scale invasion happened, I couldn’t keep going because there was something so much bigger. An all-destructive force.
Rumpus: You start by immersing us in the world of the brides. But about a hundred pages in, everything changes. Not only the story but the form.
Reva: Most of what you see on the page, structure-wise, really is how the book came together. I was writing one storyline, and then the full-scale invasion began, and I had no idea how to keep going. Life derailed and so did the book.
Rumpus: Can you tell me about that?
Reva: I was grappling with many questions. Who has the right to tell a war story? Is it wrong to write into the trope of the mail-order-bride at a time like this?
I abandoned the book and turned to a different novel, set in Utah. Unsurprisingly, it turned out to be especially grisly and violent. And structurally, it didn’t work as a novel. When my agent pointed this out, I wallowed. Two unwritable novels.
I happened to be at a writer’s residency, in a house made of glass. There were people looking in from their kayaks and canoes from the lake, looking at the writer inside but all that so-called writer wanted to do was flatten herself under the vintage sofa and never write again. This lasted about twenty-four hours. Luckily my sister, Anna Pidgorna, a composer, was there with me. She pulled me out from under the sofa.
Who does know how to write about war as it’s happening? Your sense of the world is coming apart at the seams. I was safely in Canada, yes, but it created this extra layer of confusion. Of non-reality. Dislocation. My homeland on fire, my mother and sister fielding phone calls from panicked relatives in Ukraine, invitations to wine parties in Vancouver. I was part of a curling league, and I could have stripped naked in that ice rink and not felt a sting of cold.
The confusion about how to write about war. How to keep creating art. Since that was the question that felt most alive, that’s how I decided to reframe Endling. It’s not a war novel. It’s more like a how-do-you-write-about-war novel. Eventually my artistic fears faded away. Edit: That’s a lie.
The bits in Part I that foreshadow the full-scale invasion, such as Russian troops amassing at the border, I added later. But the metafictional derailment in the middle of the plot was pretty much where I was in the fictional plot when the invasion happened.
Rumpus: It also makes me think about phrases like, “as of this edit,” when Endling reminds us a book can’t possibly keep up with history, that events keep happening. But at some point, you have to say “Done. Print it.”
Reva: It felt like trying to make a sculpture out of liquid. I had to remind myself that my book didn’t have to encapsulate the war. It’s a snapshot of it. Or several snapshots, taken at different times and superimposed.
Rumpus: What does it mean to send your fictional characters into a story to rescue your real-life grandfather?
Reva: It means utter powerlessness. Fantasy. Even if I’d physically gone myself, he still would have refused to leave Kherson. I’ve had to accept his decision. He’s been physically declining. I didn’t know to what degree until after I finished the book. He wants to keep living on his own, retain his independence and physical privacy at whatever cost. It appears that the indignities and horrors of one’s aging body can be even greater than the horrors of war.
Rumpus: That must be so hard.
Reva: I’m emphasizing the physical privacy bit as if it somehow makes my book not an infringement of his privacy. Like one type of privacy is physical and the other, the assailable one, is spiritual and somehow different.
Rumpus: What does it mean to send your own real-life body to a place you are writing fiction about?
Reva: Good question. When I went to Ukraine in March 2023, I had this urge to keep a journal. For research purposes, sure, but it was a distancing technique too. If I see the reality as material, I can keep it at a safer distance, right? I can control how close it gets to me, can’t I?
While in Ukraine, that illusion would crack when I heard a sound I couldn’t account for. A military drone? A training exercise? But it would soon reseal itself.
People who live there have to operate that way, too. There’s a sense of safety you must construct for yourself, one that cracks and reseals.
Back in Canada, that illusion of safety cracks, too. After returning from Ukraine, there’s a specific tone or pitch—it could be the whine of a construction vehicle or something totally unexpected—that sounds like an air raid siren revving up. With Trump’s recent 51st-state-rhetoric, it’s not such a far-off thing to imagine war coming to Canada.
I’ve considered going back to Ukraine, specifically to Kherson, but the attacks have worsened. The urge is not only to see my grandfather, but as some duty to my novel. I wrote the story, but now the story is trying to write me, my actions.
Rumpus: In Endling, you make narrative decisions about who lives and dies. War is not like that—there’s not meaning in it. Is it a powerful thing to create meaning with narrative choices or is it a horrible thing?
Reva: As I’ve had to learn, fiction works by different laws than real life. In an earlier draft, a major character dies at the end. Those who read that draft were heart-broken. Did she really have to die? At first, I dug my heels in. Then I felt it was the author heavy-handedly, angrily saying: “You were attached to her, were you? Let me teach you a lesson about war. It doesn’t care! And by that logic I will take this character away.” There’s “no meaning in it,” as you said.
It’s that “I’ll show the reader” sentiment that made me dial things back. Have her death be less certain. Even if it could fit the narrative, I was suspicious of my reasoning. As a reader, I never enjoy it when the author is hellbent on teaching me something.
So, at first it felt powerful to choose who died and who didn’t, but that power was illusory.
Rumpus: I appreciate how Endling holds that tension—the metafictional elements make me recognize that these are narrative choices to force a meaning rather than thinking the war itself has a moral authority. The authorial interjections help keeps the story from becoming romanticized.
Reva: That’s a good way of putting it. To avoid the story from being romanticized. Maybe also to emphasize my own confusion, the things I’m grappling with. Not to try to pierce through the fog of war but to say that it’s an impossible task in itself.
Rumpus: A central question of the book is, “What right do I have to write about the war from my armchair?” Have you reached an answer?
Reva: No single perspective can encapsulate a war. Hence the expression, “fog of war.” War hits different people differently, depending on their proximity to the front line, their resources, their past, their age and mobility, the dependents that force them to move or to stay in place, and a myriad other factors. We’re still writing about the World Wars. We still can’t claim to fully understand them. So, the more perspectives, the more lenses, the better.
I think. I hope.
I hope I bring something to the discussion another person might not. A bi-cultural perspective, for instance—the ability to frame the material in English. A terrible but necessary part of my research was watching a lot of footage from all over Ukraine filmed through civilian phones. Some of it is really graphic. Maybe I wouldn’t have been able to sustain that kind of research while living in Ukraine. Maybe all I would’ve wanted was to escape mentally from that reality rather than keep trying to dig into it. I don’t know.
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Author photograph courtesy of Maria Reva
