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| Maria reva |
BOOKS OF THE YEAR
MARIA REVA
BY LARA PRESCOTT
March 4, 2020
In 2015, when the twelve incoming graduate students at the Michener Center for Writers sent around emails introducing ourselves, one person caught my eye: Maria Reva. Maria had written that she lived in Vancouver—having immigrated there from Ukraine when she was seven—and was currently working construction to support her writing. “I work with some nasty chemicals and lead paint,” she wrote, “but get to wear a space suit (kind of).”
This first glimpse into Maria’s weird and wonderful mind was the perfect introduction to her fiction: stories that have made me laugh out loud, tear up, find shards of hope in the least likely of places, and Google facts like if “bone music” really exists.
It does. I first read Maria’s story “Bone Music” in Elizabeth McCracken’s fiction workshop a few months after our email introductions. Reading this equally hilarious and heartbreaking story about an agoraphobic woman named Smena who hasn’t left her apartment in years but runs a successful underground business selling illegal vinyl records copied onto medical X-rays, broke me in two.
Set on the cusp of the Soviet Union’s demise, Smena lives on the tenth floor of a Ukrainian apartment building, which, due to a clerical error, the government insists doesn’t exist. When the story opens, Smena is visited by a neighbor, Nika, from the fifth floor. Alongside their cups of bitter tea and stale biscuits, Nika sets an X-ray on the table: an image of her own skull with the telltale shadow of a tumor. Nika asks about the music she’s heard Smena produces, cut into such X-rays, and about Smena’s two-room apartment (a rarity), which Smena takes as a possible threat.
As the story unfolds, we too question Nika’s motives; and like Smena, we also start looking forward to her visits.
“Bone Music” is a story that gets to the heart of what it must have been like to live in the crumbling Soviet Republic—a world where trust couldn’t be earned and threats of imprisonment for minor freedoms were still common. “Now an invisible hand was loosening the screws,” writes Maria, “but it was impossible to tell which screws, and for how long the loosening would last.”
I feel so fortunate to have witnessed Maria put her old construction skills to work in building the linked stories that make up the absurd, funny, devastating world in her debut collection Good Citizens Need Not Fear. I often think back to “Bone Music” and wonder what song would be imprinted on an X-ray of Maria’s own head. Not the Megadeth that Smena has grown to enjoy or the Coltrane that makes Nika close her eyes and sway. The answer still eludes me, but I do know this: whatever it is, it will be strange, beautiful, and so very full of life.
– Lara Prescott
Author of The Secrets We Kept
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