Write Now with Scrivener, Episode no. 55: Maria Reva, Booker Prize Longlisted Author of Endling

Show notes:

• Maria Reva
• Endling
• Ed Yong: The Last of Its Kind
• Salvador Plascencia: The People of Paper
• Booker Prize Facebook post with photos of authors’ workspaces
• Anelise Chen: Clamdown

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Maria Reva’s Booker Prize longlisted Endling is an absurdist road trip, a heist novel, and a postmodern metafiction about snails, romance tours, and the war in Ukraine.

Maria was born in Ukraine, and her family moved to Canada when she was young. "I was seven years old when we immigrated from Ukraine to Canada. My dad had this children’s atlas and he saw that, in Vancouver, there were mountains and beaches very close together. So he thought you could ski and swim in the same day. That is how we landed in Vancouver."

This novel was many years in the making, and because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Maria put it aside for a while. "I started writing the novel in 2018. It was four years into this novel when Russia launched its full-scale invasion. My relatives in Ukraine called our family here in Canada, saying they were hearing explosions in their cities. At the time, I gave up on my novel. I thought, ‘how can I possibly keep writing this if its setting is being destroyed in real time?’"

But giving up wasn’t the answer. "Because these questions kept circulating in my mind about, ‘what is my role as an artist in such calamitous times? How do I keep writing this book when its premise doesn’t feel right to me anymore? And how do we keep living in the West while watching these atrocities abroad?’ I kept thinking about all these questions, and my relatives in Ukraine. I figured maybe I’ll try to fold this into the fabric of the novel itself and make it the book."

The two main themes of the book are saving the last snail of a species – endling "is a scientific term, and it means the last surviving member of a species. So after that organism dies, that’s it for the entire species," – and the romance tour industry. "The romance tour industry used to happen in Ukraine before the full-scale invasion, where marriage agencies would bring in men from all over the world into Ukraine, sold on this promise that they would find the perfect docile bride there, as feminism hadn’t made it into Ukraine. There would be these romantic itineraries, like 10 days, for example, where there would be a lot of speed dating and social activities. And at the end of the 10 days, you were supposed to find your perfect bride. I wanted to focus on 13 of these men who have the unfortunate luck of being kidnapped by three of the women who take part in these tours, who are actually not there to marry, [but] to bring the entire industry down."

The book has an uncommon structure; it "ends" about halfway through, with acknowledgments and blank pages, though it then continues. If you listen to the audiobook, there’s a warning at the beginning to not turn it off when you think you’ve reached the end. "We had to tailor the book in multiple ways to make those experimental parts translate well into audio."

There are also sections where Maria speaks directly to the reader or listener, through conversations with her agent about the book. I asked if Maria had difficulty with her editors in presenting such a bold structure. "I had such a wonderful experience working with my publishers, and they did not stop me. In fact, they encouraged me to experiment with this form. I think that fiction is actually aching to break apart right now because we are having trouble making sense of our reality and how to even fit it into art. So I think the normal containers we have used in the past for art are about to be stretched open again, much like after the First World War with the Dadaist movement."

Maria discovered Scrivener through her sister, a composer, who used it for her dissertation. "Why it worked so well for me is this ability to have these chunks of text that you can toggle between so easily, and you can rearrange those sections very easily by dragging them. There’s so many features I love. For example, the fact that you can color-code and choose your icons for each section. I have three different characters in this book whose perspectives I switch between. So every time there’s a Pasha section, I have him in yellow, every time there is a Nastia section, I have that in pink, and Yeva is in blue. I can see easily, ‘oh, there’s a lot of blue. It seems like I haven’t switched to Nastia for a while or forgotten about Nastia.’ It got me to balance the perspectives a bit more. Also, when I’m working on a scene and I want to experiment with something, I want to push it in a slightly different direction, but I don’t want to delete the old scene. So what I do is I duplicate that scene, and I have the two scenes side by side on the screen. I then type out the original and try the thing in the scene. If it works, then great. If it doesn’t, then it goes into my special folder called Cutaways. In case I change my mind about something, it’s really easy to take it from the Cutaways folder."

We recorded the interview about six weeks before the results of the Booker Prize. Maria said, "I feel like I want to rest during this process and enjoy the public part of a novel’s publication, the part where I get to engage with readers, because it’s so isolating to work on a book. I get to talk to people who’ve read the book and hear their perspectives on it and how the characters have impacted them. I just want to soak that in because it really does counteract the isolation."