It’s too bad that it’s so late, because I read two powerhouse books back-to-back that I’d love to tell you about. Unfortunately I’m not feeling very energetic so late in the evening after a long day at work, so you’ll just get an abbreviated version of the comments I’d really like to make!
The first book is Endling by Canadian author Maria Reva, which was a showstopper of a book. The opening chapters focus on Yeva, a woman in her mid-thirties who has fitted out a camper van to serve as a mobile lab. She tours around Ukraine saving the last snails in various species, the “endlings”, and does her best to appreciate them and/or keep them going for as long as possible. Her saddest moments are recording the date and time of their passing, which is the date and time of the end of each species. She funds the maintenance and upkeep of the van by working for a “mail order bride” company run by a Canadian woman who provides opportunities for Western men to travel to Ukraine and go on “romance tours” to meet Ukrainian women. While Yeva is older than most other “brides”, she does alright. One day, having worn herself out with her conservation efforts, she allows an unforgivable event to occur and decides to end it all once she’s returned all the remaining endlings to the places where she originally found them. But before this can happen, she is approached by one of the other, much younger “brides”, Anastasia (Nastia), who asks a favour: could she use the van for one night? Although she initially refuses, Yeva is pulled into Nastia’s plan to kidnap 100 of the men from the tour, in retaliation for the 100 brides from (Korea? Japan? I can't remember) who recently disappeared, and also to draw attention to the whole misogynistic idea of “mail order brides”. Together, these women, along with Nastia’s older sister Sol, set out on an adventure that will surely save them all, but on the day of the kidnapping, Russia invades Ukraine. This seems like a straightforward story of women working together and surviving unimaginable events … or at least, this is what we’re led to believe. But right in the middle of the book comes an unexpected twist that is guaranteed to make any reader sit up and take notice. I can’t tell you any more, but let’s just say that I wish there was a literary term like “genre-bending” that applied to books that break the fiction/non-fiction barrier. It was so much more I could tell you about if I had the time and energy, including another narrator, Pasha, a man in his 30s who was born in Ukraine but spent most of his life in Vancouver, encouraged by his parents to quash anything about himself that is not 100% Canadian. This highly addictive, highly intelligent book delves into so many topics and goes off in so many directions that it is sure to appeal to just about any reader, and I would highly recommend it.
The next book also has a twist near the middle that I won’t be able to tell you about for fear of ruining the story. What We Can Know, the latest novel by award-winning British author Ian McEwan, is set in 2119 in a part of Britain that is now a series of islands due to the rising sea levels and a tsunami from which many cities never resurfaced. The narrator is Tom, an English Literature professor who, along with his colleague Rose, specializes in “90-30”, or literature spanning from 1990-2030, in particular the life and poetry of Francis Blundy, especially the lost poem, “A Corona for Vivien”, written for Blundy’s wife and read aloud as a gift for her at her 54th birthday dinner amongst a houseful of friends. Tom is determined to find this poem, around which so much speculation, admiration and awe has grown, despite having never again been read. Although set in the near future, when all the cataclysmic climate crises we’re expecting have already occurred, it feels as though it’s written in the present day, and the time period of Blundy’s dinner and corona delivery, around 2014, is treated as a “golden age”, viewed through the proverbial “rose-coloured glasses” that we often use when thinking of times gone by. Tom is certain that he can discover where the poem is hidden if only he keeps researching and rereading the letters and documents between and about Vivien and Francis. When his big break comes, we, along with Tom, are hopeful that he’ll discover the missing poem, but what he finds doesn’t even come close to what he was expecting. It’s at this point that we are treated to a totally unexpected surprise that I don’t want to reveal, but which perfectly rounds out the novel and solves the mystery. This book is about… everything. It’s about the challenges of writing a biography, and asks what we can truly know about a person. It’s about the climate crisis, and the power of literary works to draw attention to and highlight it. It’s about love and relationships, literature as a measure of our time and history, and about the often difficult, often solitary lives of writers. There was so much more to this book, but I can’t really recall anything else right now (while I was reading it, I was saying to myself, on practically every page, “I must remember to include this in my blog, and this, and this, and this…”). On top of being about "everything", it was also so very well-written, as readers have come to expect from McEwan. I would highly recommend this novel, which I guess is “science fiction” or “speculative fiction” (to use Margaret Atwood’s term), as it’s set nearly a century from now, to anyone who likes literary fiction and literary mysteries.
That’s all for tonight. Stay warm and read a good book!
Bye for now… Julie
