Saturday, August 23, 2025

Book Review: ENDLING by Maria Reva

EndlingEndling by Maria Reva
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

“It’s what you all do, in the free world. You waste your freedom and your clear skies on things that don’t matter, like politeness and the perfect lawn… is it better to live in a world where a gas station with nukes gets to call the shots?”

ENDLING was my fifth book in the Booker Longlist, and so far it has proved the most memorable, though decidedly not easy reading.

An endling is the last known representative of a species. When it dies, a whole branch of the evolutionary tree becomes extinct.

Author Maria Reva (born in the Ukraine, raised in Canada) has written what I suspect to be an autobiographical novel that manages to be both urgent call to action and an indictment on the apathy of the entire world. Reva points at the absurdity of our world where aesthetic Booksta reels coexist along with full-scale invasions in these contemporary, supposedly civilized times.

The novel is satire, awkward romance, and war epic all in one, as it jumps from the main narrative to chapters between author and editor. Memorable technical details include an ABOUT THE AUTHOR portion in the middle that had me flipping pages to and fro, panicking that the book had abruptly ended, as well as a chapter in the end written three different times.

Some books have clever details that sometimes come across as mere technical braggadocio, but in this book, it seems to highlight the book’s message: the impossibility (futility?) of crafting a cohesive narrative in the face of genocide. When the blood of innocents soaks the chernozem, Ukraine’s fertile soil, what is the point of writing, or even reading?

For Reva, she is torn between preserving memory, and railing at the craziness of Russia invading Ukraine, and how the rest of humanity is fine with the mass extinction of an entire country, an entire people. She shows how we cling to empty shells of what we think constitute a meaningful existence, lies easily torn apart in the face of the first enemy bomb.

This is the first time I’ve put down a book, doubting if it mattered. Perhaps my reading doesn’t. But her writing of this marvelous book certainly does. She writes now with anger, then with laughter mixed with tears, and all the vast ocean of humanity’s infinite heart lie within this remarkable novel. What a tribute to the heroes of Ukraine. What a strong contender for the Booker Prize.




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Book Review: ENDLING by Maria Reva