Author Maria Reva's return to Ukraine inspired her to complete novel

Ottawa Citizen

21 hours ago

In 2023, Maria Reva and her sister were on a train hurtling through a Ukrainian night toward the battle-scarred city of Kherson. They were hoping to reach their grandfather, still there in the midst of carnage. It was crisis time for Reva in more ways than one. The novel she had started to write back in Canada was in jeopardy: what she had originally envisaged as a lighthearted romp satirizing Ukraine's controversial 'romance' tours had been upended by Russian aggression.
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'I initially felt I had two choices,' the award-winning Canadian writer says now. 'I could keep writing the novel as though nothing happened in real time. Or I could give up on it.'
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Ultimately, she didn't give up. That return to Ukraine helped her find a way back in, and her debut novel, Endling, has now been published to international acclaim. Typical is the verdict of revered American novelist Percival Everett: 'I love works that are smarter than I am, and this is one.' He's talking about a daring, genre-bending achievement in which Reva herself becomes a recurring presence in the course of a fast-paced narrative.
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'I gave up on it multiple times,' she tells Postmedia from her home on Canada's West Coast. 'I honestly did not envisage any future for it beyond finishing it.'
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In the midst of this struggle came the need to return to the embattled country of her birth. Reva was seven when she and her family emigrated to Canada in 1997. She had been back many time since — 'but I had a sense of terror when I thought of going to Ukraine this time.' Still, she would adjust to the psychology of a country under siege. Once there, as the sisters moved eastward in the hope of reaching their grandfather, 'the sense of danger became more and more normalized.' Yet danger was definitely present.
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'On the train during the night, the conductor asked us to keep the blinds down so that we would not emit any light because trains had become a target for the Russians. The way that my sister and I thought of it was that we were in a closed moving coffin.'
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The moment came when they could go no further. They would not reach the grandfather they loved.
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'It was very difficult accepting limitations on what I was capable of,' Reva says sombrely. 'I think that's why my fiction allows me the fantasy of going where I could not.' So a grandfather figure does play a seminal role in the novel she was able to complete.
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Reva's lighter side surfaced on late-night television a few weeks ago with her cheerfully discussing the sex life of snails with NBC host Seth Meyers. She might have seemed light-years away from the horrors of Ukraine but in fact she was talking about the very same book, Endling, that had confronted her with so many challenges.