I read Endling in the shortest timeline of all my summer reading, about 48 hours. I ordered it from the library who ordered it from a library an hour away. It was my first of the 2025 Man Booker longlist. I loved it. 

These aren’t intended to be like, a book report, but I feel like I’m consuming/absorbing/ingesting so much right now and I’m forgetting it all already. 

I read this one at my friend’s camp on the lake that her dad just finished renovating. I really don’t get the idea of a camp, like I would just live there. I don’t get having two spaces. To each their own, I guess. 

So, it was a nice day, and I ate s’mores and pizza and read this book about snails fucking & the invasion of Ukraine. I really don’t think about the tangibles of geopolitical conflict as much as I talk about pretending to think about them. By that I mean, reading this and watching the author interject her reality into the half real half fiction stories of her characters was, for lack of a better word, mind blowing. I honestly feel like my brain cracked open during this. 

I write a lot about people I know or knew or knew tangentially or heard about. I don’t often write in such a direct way as Reva, in which she tangles all of the real and unreal together and then tries to pry them apart in front of the readers eyes. The reader sees the process, reads through bits of the moral failings and struggle for clarity or responsibility or privilege in writing about conflict when you have been shielded from or escaped it. Then, she acknowledges that this transparency is not absolution. And still, the whole time, you wonder if the snail who has a unique spiral pattern will ever find the other 1 in a million-chance snail whose insides also twist to the left instead of the typical right. 

For a book about a marriage agency and the women who worked there, the novel is no half-baked metaphor about love or fate or romantic Aristophanic ritual of meeting your other. It’s snails and homelands and loss and then also, men seeking exoticized women through a commercial dating program. Women in the story are real in the unreal/real sense of fiction (and especially half fiction/half narrative nonfiction), in the small ways that add up, how they fuck or don’t fuck or how they hyperfixate or don’t, how they sleep or drive or how they lay in the swamp covered in bugs, but especially in how they do not coddle each other, or anyone. In a world at once desperate for a feminism grounded in Trad Wives or OF accounts or Girlbosses, Reva decenters men from the story without dismissing the structures built by and perpetuated for those men. 

The traditional idealized maternal figure is distinctly absent from the novel, but the desperation for her is everywhere. The rebalancing of this dynamic contributed to the strength of Reva’s ability to build stories/convey meaning even in absence. When the “idealized” woman begins to materialize in the fantasy of the sole male narrator, the reader is reminded of his fraudulent and performative reality, an inside joke for the reader to pity without seriousness.   

I finished Endling in the library, the only of the books I have finished there this summer. Then I started Audition by Katie Kimura.