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The Extinction of Irena Rey
From the International Booker Prize–winning translator and Women's Prize finalist, a propulsive, beguiling novel about eight translators and their search for a world-renowned author who goes missing in a primeval Polish forest.
Eight translators arrive at a house in a forest on the border of Belarus. It belongs to the world-renowned author Irena Rey, and they are there to translate her magnum opus, Gray Eminence. But within days of their arrival, Irena disappears without a trace.
The translators, who hail from eight different countries but share the same reverence for their beloved author, begin to investigate where she may have gone while proceeding with work on her masterpiece. They explore this ancient wooded refuge with its intoxicating slime molds and lichens, and study her exotic belongings and layered texts for clues. But doing so reveals secrets — and deceptions — of Irena Rey's that they are utterly unprepared for. Forced to face their differences as they grow increasingly paranoid in this fever dream of isolation and obsession, soon the translators are tangled up in a web of rivalries and desire, threatening not only their work but the fate of their beloved author herself.
This hilarious, thought-provoking second outing by award-winning translator and author Jennifer Croft is a brilliant examination of art, celebrity, the natural world, and the power of language. It is an unforgettable, unputdownable adventure with a small but global cast of characters shaken by the shocks of love, destruction, and creation in one of Europe’s last great wildernesses.
Eight translators arrive at a house in a forest on the border of Belarus. It belongs to the world-renowned author Irena Rey, and they are there to translate her magnum opus, Gray Eminence. But within days of their arrival, Irena disappears without a trace.
The translators, who hail from eight different countries but share the same reverence for their beloved author, begin to investigate where she may have gone while proceeding with work on her masterpiece. They explore this ancient wooded refuge with its intoxicating slime molds and lichens, and study her exotic belongings and layered texts for clues. But doing so reveals secrets — and deceptions — of Irena Rey's that they are utterly unprepared for. Forced to face their differences as they grow increasingly paranoid in this fever dream of isolation and obsession, soon the translators are tangled up in a web of rivalries and desire, threatening not only their work but the fate of their beloved author herself.
This hilarious, thought-provoking second outing by award-winning translator and author Jennifer Croft is a brilliant examination of art, celebrity, the natural world, and the power of language. It is an unforgettable, unputdownable adventure with a small but global cast of characters shaken by the shocks of love, destruction, and creation in one of Europe’s last great wildernesses.
320 pages, Hardcover
First published March 5, 2024
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25.4k people want to read
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May 28, 2024
The premise of this book was intriguing. And a little confusing. This was written by Jennifer Croft, the translator for some of Olga Tokarczuk’s work. I love Tokarczuk so I knew I had to get my hands on this. Plus, it kept eyeing me from its face-out on the bookshelf! Eight translators gather in Poland to translate the newest work, Grey Eminence, by fictional author Irena Rey. The very real, solid book by my side as I write this, The Extinction of Irena Rey, is told from the first-person point of view by Irena’s Spanish translator. That in turn is translated by “English”, one of Croft’s characters and the translator of that language in this novel – with footnotes, often snide ones at that! If this seems bonkers already, then you will have a sense of how I felt for the first half of the book. Until it finally fell into place for me, and I understood what author Jennifer Croft was doing.
“She was warmth, she was moisture, she was light, she was the adamant perfection of a million billion snowflakes in a split second’s descent, she was tender, she was eternal, and she was memory, she was love. She was everything we’d ever wanted, all anyone could want in the world.”
Irena’s translators are obsessed with her. They drop everything and isolate themselves in the Białowieża forest of Poland to do her bidding and translate her work. They even agree to not translate any other Polish author’s work to stay in Irena’s favor. Shortly after the eight arrive however, Irena disappears. The word shenanigans comes to mind! There’s plenty of mystery surrounding Irena’s whereabouts, but there’s also lots of arguing and loads of sexual tension, particularly as Irena has a new translator on board this year, “Swedish”.
“Swedish was new, handsome as a red deer, and we knew at first sight that he would be her favorite. Not only because of the prestige of his language, a conduit to her inevitable Nobel Prize, but also because of his saunter, his stance, that gratifying invitation in his hot blue eyes.”
There’s a lot of subtle humor humming just below the surface. Be sharp or you might miss it – admittedly, I did at times. I wasn’t always on my game while reading this book. Croft also focuses on the natural world, logging, historical artifacts and of course the art of language and translation. Oh, and there’s quite a lot about fungi within these pages as well. A bit of a coincidence once again. I’ve seemed to run into this topic accidentally more than once this year. Croft even goes so far as to cleverly tie this into the world of translation.
“In the end, what we do is mycelial. What we do as translators is stitch the world into a united and communicating whole.”
While extolling the value of translation one minute, Croft will then turn around and, through the voice of one of her translator characters, she will make a disparaging comment. This confused me initially, but then I realized what she was doing was putting forward not her own thoughts, but perhaps the thoughts of others regarding the world of translation. While defending their position of staying on at Irena’s home to translate her work during her absence, the translators believe it is their duty to protect “their author.” Take a look at this “footnote” provided by the English translator character in this book:
“The reference here is to the superstition among certain readers who believe translations necessarily adulterate their originals, and thereby ruin them. (I think I have shown irrefutably throughout this novel that a translation is often superior to its original, but of course this is for you to decide.)”
I’m not sure how to get across the feel of this book. It’s an odd one, really - but not in a bad way. The plot itself wasn’t all that propulsive, but I found some funny moments, a lot of clever thoughts surrounding translations, and some wonderful descriptions of the forest. If anything I’ve said sounds tempting, then you might be the right reader for this novel. If you’re thinking what the hell is Candi going on about, then you might want to give this a pass! Three stars for the story, four stars for the writing. That makes a 3.5 star book for me.
“I was gripped by an urge to inscribe our existence, the existence and significance of us as translators, how we mattered, and how we dissolved, which came to the same, like the horizon at sea.”
“She was warmth, she was moisture, she was light, she was the adamant perfection of a million billion snowflakes in a split second’s descent, she was tender, she was eternal, and she was memory, she was love. She was everything we’d ever wanted, all anyone could want in the world.”
Irena’s translators are obsessed with her. They drop everything and isolate themselves in the Białowieża forest of Poland to do her bidding and translate her work. They even agree to not translate any other Polish author’s work to stay in Irena’s favor. Shortly after the eight arrive however, Irena disappears. The word shenanigans comes to mind! There’s plenty of mystery surrounding Irena’s whereabouts, but there’s also lots of arguing and loads of sexual tension, particularly as Irena has a new translator on board this year, “Swedish”.
“Swedish was new, handsome as a red deer, and we knew at first sight that he would be her favorite. Not only because of the prestige of his language, a conduit to her inevitable Nobel Prize, but also because of his saunter, his stance, that gratifying invitation in his hot blue eyes.”
There’s a lot of subtle humor humming just below the surface. Be sharp or you might miss it – admittedly, I did at times. I wasn’t always on my game while reading this book. Croft also focuses on the natural world, logging, historical artifacts and of course the art of language and translation. Oh, and there’s quite a lot about fungi within these pages as well. A bit of a coincidence once again. I’ve seemed to run into this topic accidentally more than once this year. Croft even goes so far as to cleverly tie this into the world of translation.
“In the end, what we do is mycelial. What we do as translators is stitch the world into a united and communicating whole.”
While extolling the value of translation one minute, Croft will then turn around and, through the voice of one of her translator characters, she will make a disparaging comment. This confused me initially, but then I realized what she was doing was putting forward not her own thoughts, but perhaps the thoughts of others regarding the world of translation. While defending their position of staying on at Irena’s home to translate her work during her absence, the translators believe it is their duty to protect “their author.” Take a look at this “footnote” provided by the English translator character in this book:
“The reference here is to the superstition among certain readers who believe translations necessarily adulterate their originals, and thereby ruin them. (I think I have shown irrefutably throughout this novel that a translation is often superior to its original, but of course this is for you to decide.)”
I’m not sure how to get across the feel of this book. It’s an odd one, really - but not in a bad way. The plot itself wasn’t all that propulsive, but I found some funny moments, a lot of clever thoughts surrounding translations, and some wonderful descriptions of the forest. If anything I’ve said sounds tempting, then you might be the right reader for this novel. If you’re thinking what the hell is Candi going on about, then you might want to give this a pass! Three stars for the story, four stars for the writing. That makes a 3.5 star book for me.
“I was gripped by an urge to inscribe our existence, the existence and significance of us as translators, how we mattered, and how we dissolved, which came to the same, like the horizon at sea.”
Read
July 25, 2024I should write a serious thoughtful review of this book but I'm not sure I can, partly because there's a blue-bottle fly buzzing around the room, landing here, settling there, offering himself up for an easy swipe—but as soon as I prepare to whack him, away he goes again.
So I'll simply tell you why I bought this book, and leave it at that.
You see, when I heard that Jennifer Croft, translator of some of Olga Tokarchuk's novels into English, had written a novel about translation, my reading antennae went into alert mode not only because I admire Olga T a lot but also because I've read some great books by translators.
And when I discovered that Croft's novel was about a group of translators of different nationalities who had travelled to a little town near an ancient forest in south east Poland, roughly the area where Olga T lives, and that the translators were there to translate the latest book by a 'famous Polish writer known for her environmental concerns', well, I ordered the book straightaway—although it's still in hardback.
Half way through typing that paragraph I opened up the sliding door in the hope the fly might leave...
Ok, while I'm waiting to see if he's finally gone, I'll just add a little about the surprises that awaited me when the book arrived in the post.
The first surprise was the truly beautiful cover image. It shows a blue-green forest that is close to how I imagined the forest in Olga T's Primeval—and there are some mushrooms in the foreground that remind me of her House of Day, House of Night, and of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead.
Jennifer Croft's name in Barbie pink kind of ruins the overall effect but I love the cover all the same.
The second surprise was finding, on the very first page, a 'Note from the Translator' signed by someone called Alexis Archer! Did Jennifer Croft not write this book in English then, I wondered? But as I read the note, I realised what was going on: Croft's novel about a group of translators has been 'fictionally written' by the Argentinian member of the group, and therefore the text had to be 'fictionally translated' into English by the fictional Alexis Archer. Ok, I was happy to go along with that scenario. But the note wasn't finished yet. Alexis Archer wanted to tell me that she herself is one of the group of translators who features in the novel she has translated, and—wait for it—she is not happy with how she has been portrayed. She is 'uncomfortable' with the emphases on her beauty and resents that she's often blamed for things that go wrong. She also complains about the Argentinian author/narrator's version of the 'true events' the novel is based on—which don't always match with how she experienced them. She doesn't like the original title either and has changed it. And furthermore, she's really really annoyed that the Polish-origin Argentinian didn't write the novel in her native Spanish but chose to write it in Polish instead—which Alexis considers to be just not good enough!
By the end of the Translator's Note, instead of being intrigued, I was so annoyed by Alexis's whiny tone that I lost the will to read the book she was going to be a character in. And when I flicked through it, I saw she had inserted footnotes here and there to correct what the narrator was saying about Alexis herself and about their interactions. Ridiculous, I thought, and I set the book aside.
Fast-forward several weeks during which I read several great books, and the beautiful blue-green jacket of this expensive hardback caught my eye again. It can't be all bad, I decided, and I began to read the first chapter...
Slow-forward another couple of weeks and I finished the last chapter.
Drat, the buzzy fly has started up again just when I thought of adding something further to this non-review. But I'll add it anyway: I liked that Jennifer Croft managed to give her author/narrator, Emi, a different voice from the whiny Alexis who translated Emi's book. But, unfortunately for me, I also found Emi's voice annoying at times, and her approach to telling the story was full of dodges and dives. The narrative careens all over the place, and is impossible to get a fix on. I can't count how many times it seemed to settle on a promising forward development only for it to fly off again on its crazy trajectory a paragraph later.
And the fictional Olga-like author, Irena Rey, whose latest environment-themed novel the group of translators had gathered to translate, was absent for most of the book which meant I found it hard to believe she ever existed and difficult to be interested in the bizarre-sounding text of her book—which is one book-within-a-book-within-a-book too many even for this meta-loving reader!
I also felt that Irena Rey's 'mysterious' disappearance has too slim a connection to the threatened forest which is the book's setting—though their dual threatened extinction should have been a great premise for a novel.
I'll finish with a line that caught my glazed-over eyes: "After all, every reading is an action a person takes upon a book."
My action in this case seems to have been a swipe. There! Got you, you pesky fly!
So I'll simply tell you why I bought this book, and leave it at that.
You see, when I heard that Jennifer Croft, translator of some of Olga Tokarchuk's novels into English, had written a novel about translation, my reading antennae went into alert mode not only because I admire Olga T a lot but also because I've read some great books by translators.
And when I discovered that Croft's novel was about a group of translators of different nationalities who had travelled to a little town near an ancient forest in south east Poland, roughly the area where Olga T lives, and that the translators were there to translate the latest book by a 'famous Polish writer known for her environmental concerns', well, I ordered the book straightaway—although it's still in hardback.
Half way through typing that paragraph I opened up the sliding door in the hope the fly might leave...
Ok, while I'm waiting to see if he's finally gone, I'll just add a little about the surprises that awaited me when the book arrived in the post.
The first surprise was the truly beautiful cover image. It shows a blue-green forest that is close to how I imagined the forest in Olga T's Primeval—and there are some mushrooms in the foreground that remind me of her House of Day, House of Night, and of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead.
Jennifer Croft's name in Barbie pink kind of ruins the overall effect but I love the cover all the same.
The second surprise was finding, on the very first page, a 'Note from the Translator' signed by someone called Alexis Archer! Did Jennifer Croft not write this book in English then, I wondered? But as I read the note, I realised what was going on: Croft's novel about a group of translators has been 'fictionally written' by the Argentinian member of the group, and therefore the text had to be 'fictionally translated' into English by the fictional Alexis Archer. Ok, I was happy to go along with that scenario. But the note wasn't finished yet. Alexis Archer wanted to tell me that she herself is one of the group of translators who features in the novel she has translated, and—wait for it—she is not happy with how she has been portrayed. She is 'uncomfortable' with the emphases on her beauty and resents that she's often blamed for things that go wrong. She also complains about the Argentinian author/narrator's version of the 'true events' the novel is based on—which don't always match with how she experienced them. She doesn't like the original title either and has changed it. And furthermore, she's really really annoyed that the Polish-origin Argentinian didn't write the novel in her native Spanish but chose to write it in Polish instead—which Alexis considers to be just not good enough!
By the end of the Translator's Note, instead of being intrigued, I was so annoyed by Alexis's whiny tone that I lost the will to read the book she was going to be a character in. And when I flicked through it, I saw she had inserted footnotes here and there to correct what the narrator was saying about Alexis herself and about their interactions. Ridiculous, I thought, and I set the book aside.
Fast-forward several weeks during which I read several great books, and the beautiful blue-green jacket of this expensive hardback caught my eye again. It can't be all bad, I decided, and I began to read the first chapter...
Slow-forward another couple of weeks and I finished the last chapter.
Drat, the buzzy fly has started up again just when I thought of adding something further to this non-review. But I'll add it anyway: I liked that Jennifer Croft managed to give her author/narrator, Emi, a different voice from the whiny Alexis who translated Emi's book. But, unfortunately for me, I also found Emi's voice annoying at times, and her approach to telling the story was full of dodges and dives. The narrative careens all over the place, and is impossible to get a fix on. I can't count how many times it seemed to settle on a promising forward development only for it to fly off again on its crazy trajectory a paragraph later.
And the fictional Olga-like author, Irena Rey, whose latest environment-themed novel the group of translators had gathered to translate, was absent for most of the book which meant I found it hard to believe she ever existed and difficult to be interested in the bizarre-sounding text of her book—which is one book-within-a-book-within-a-book too many even for this meta-loving reader!
I also felt that Irena Rey's 'mysterious' disappearance has too slim a connection to the threatened forest which is the book's setting—though their dual threatened extinction should have been a great premise for a novel.
I'll finish with a line that caught my glazed-over eyes: "After all, every reading is an action a person takes upon a book."
My action in this case seems to have been a swipe. There! Got you, you pesky fly!
February 27, 2024
Jennifer Croft’s droll, brainteaser of a novel slowly shifts into the realms of the absurd. Like characters from Agatha Christie, eight translators are summoned to an isolated house on the edge of an ancient, Polish forest. Once there, their host, world-famous author Irena Rey, inexplicably vanishes, leaving her eight translators to work out what’s happened – and if it might happen to them too. The book we’re presented with is an account of their experiences and attempts to find Rey. It’s written by one of the eight - at first known only by her translation language Spanish, later as Emi. However, there’s a complication, the version of Emi’s autofictional piece on offer here is actually a translation from Polish to English. A translation carried out by English aka Alexis, another of the eight, and a character in Emi’s book. Alexis’s introduction makes it clear she considers Emi’s version of events highly suspect, casting doubt on her reliability as a narrator. But Alexis’s framing is also somewhat self-serving - since she’s obviously unhappy about her portrayal here - so could it actually be Alexis who’s unreliable? It’s a conundrum we’re left to ponder.
Emi recounts the eight’s arrival at Rey’s house, she’s distraught that the once-luminous Irena now seems close to abject, apparently abandoned by her husband, and oddly tight-lipped about her new book Grey Eminence previously billed as her magnum opus. There’s a pervasive sense of foreboding, intensified by an ill-fated, expedition to nearby Białowieża Forest, a brooding, primeval place with a sinister history. The house too has a gothic feel despite its Japanese, organic design, filled with strange artefacts, it’s a veritable cabinet of curiosities. In Alexis’s translation, Emi’s style seems unintentionally amusing, mannered and bordering on archaic at times. But is this an accurate reflection of Emi’s writing or a parody that furthers Alexis’s agenda? Or could it be that Alexis just isn’t a very competent translator? Alexis muddies the waters even further by interweaving Emi’s text with detailed footnotes that veer between clarification, exasperation and outright intervention. It’s a move worthy of Borges, whose influence is detectable throughout Jennifer Croft’s novel.
Borges alongside half-buried allusions to writers like Poe and Henry James, the interplay between Emi and Alexis, Emi’s excessive reverence for Rey as author of near-sacred work versus Alexis’s more pragmatic stance, all point to Croft’s underlying concerns. Croft’s intent on exploring and contesting popular notions of authorship and meaning, relations between author and translator. Croft is known for her award-winning translations, and her novel bears distinct traces of the Polish literature she’s most famous for - particularly Olga Tokarczuk’s fiction, there’s more than a hint of Gombrowicz here too. Croft challenges traditional binaries, divides between author and translator and also, through Białowieża Forest, nature and culture. Białowieża is a unique place that Croft’s visited more than once, it sustains a rich diversity of flora, fauna and wildlife, some no longer exist anywhere but there. Croft deliberately sets her story in 2017, a time when the Forest came under threat from extensive logging projects as a result of changes in government policy. Croft uses the Forest and Rey’s character to introduce wider questions around ecology, climate change and art in a time of extinction. Rey’s new book revolves around many of these issues including whether or not art is an essentially destructive force. They’re intriguing questions although not ones that Croft always fully, or entirely convincingly, addresses.
Croft unites her interest in ecology and authorship by drawing on ideas circulating in literary, queer and feminist theory. She inserts a series of puzzling references and reflections on the fungi and lichen found throughout the forest - often regarded as discrete organisms, now understood as part of a collective, an inter-sustaining network of living things. Croft has dubbed translation a kind of ‘superlichen’ a process of interconnection and collaboration, embedded in a wider literary and cultural ecosystem. An understanding of translation which deeply troubles established notions of the author as celebrity or individual with a unique, authorial voice – an idea of authorship modelled by Emi in Croft’s narrative through Emi’s hyperbolic regard for Rey and her work. Croft’s novel of ideas is often entertaining and thought-provoking, but it can also be essayistic, dense and overpacked: Croft can't resist including commentaries on topics ranging from publishing culture to rising racism and xenophobia in Europe. I had mixed reactions to this one, it’s well-crafted and I admired its ambition. But it also felt a bit stretched out, overly long, and quite laboured at times – there are a number of points where the plot is too transparently operating as a vehicle for Croft’s ideas.
Thanks to Netgalley and publisher Scribe for an ARC
Rating: 3 to 3.5
Emi recounts the eight’s arrival at Rey’s house, she’s distraught that the once-luminous Irena now seems close to abject, apparently abandoned by her husband, and oddly tight-lipped about her new book Grey Eminence previously billed as her magnum opus. There’s a pervasive sense of foreboding, intensified by an ill-fated, expedition to nearby Białowieża Forest, a brooding, primeval place with a sinister history. The house too has a gothic feel despite its Japanese, organic design, filled with strange artefacts, it’s a veritable cabinet of curiosities. In Alexis’s translation, Emi’s style seems unintentionally amusing, mannered and bordering on archaic at times. But is this an accurate reflection of Emi’s writing or a parody that furthers Alexis’s agenda? Or could it be that Alexis just isn’t a very competent translator? Alexis muddies the waters even further by interweaving Emi’s text with detailed footnotes that veer between clarification, exasperation and outright intervention. It’s a move worthy of Borges, whose influence is detectable throughout Jennifer Croft’s novel.
Borges alongside half-buried allusions to writers like Poe and Henry James, the interplay between Emi and Alexis, Emi’s excessive reverence for Rey as author of near-sacred work versus Alexis’s more pragmatic stance, all point to Croft’s underlying concerns. Croft’s intent on exploring and contesting popular notions of authorship and meaning, relations between author and translator. Croft is known for her award-winning translations, and her novel bears distinct traces of the Polish literature she’s most famous for - particularly Olga Tokarczuk’s fiction, there’s more than a hint of Gombrowicz here too. Croft challenges traditional binaries, divides between author and translator and also, through Białowieża Forest, nature and culture. Białowieża is a unique place that Croft’s visited more than once, it sustains a rich diversity of flora, fauna and wildlife, some no longer exist anywhere but there. Croft deliberately sets her story in 2017, a time when the Forest came under threat from extensive logging projects as a result of changes in government policy. Croft uses the Forest and Rey’s character to introduce wider questions around ecology, climate change and art in a time of extinction. Rey’s new book revolves around many of these issues including whether or not art is an essentially destructive force. They’re intriguing questions although not ones that Croft always fully, or entirely convincingly, addresses.
Croft unites her interest in ecology and authorship by drawing on ideas circulating in literary, queer and feminist theory. She inserts a series of puzzling references and reflections on the fungi and lichen found throughout the forest - often regarded as discrete organisms, now understood as part of a collective, an inter-sustaining network of living things. Croft has dubbed translation a kind of ‘superlichen’ a process of interconnection and collaboration, embedded in a wider literary and cultural ecosystem. An understanding of translation which deeply troubles established notions of the author as celebrity or individual with a unique, authorial voice – an idea of authorship modelled by Emi in Croft’s narrative through Emi’s hyperbolic regard for Rey and her work. Croft’s novel of ideas is often entertaining and thought-provoking, but it can also be essayistic, dense and overpacked: Croft can't resist including commentaries on topics ranging from publishing culture to rising racism and xenophobia in Europe. I had mixed reactions to this one, it’s well-crafted and I admired its ambition. But it also felt a bit stretched out, overly long, and quite laboured at times – there are a number of points where the plot is too transparently operating as a vehicle for Croft’s ideas.
Thanks to Netgalley and publisher Scribe for an ARC
Rating: 3 to 3.5
April 21, 2024
Croft, the translator of Olga Tokarczuk, writes a mystery novel about the eight translators of some Polish Nobel Prize winner - and it's just as unhinged as it sounds. It starts with the whole book being declared a translation from Polish to English, carried out by Alexis, the English translator of Nobel winner Irena Rey. The original is supposed to have been written by Rey's Spanish translator, Emi. And as Alexis and Emi can't stand each other, we are reading a book by an unreliable narrator, translated and thus recounted by an unreliable translator, their conflict spelled out between the lines and in numerous footnotes. If you now think that's a rather complicated lens through which to tell a story, maybe start running, because it only gets more intricate.
Told in retrospect, after Rey's Nobel win in 2026, the plot is set in in 2017. Rey has just finished her latest novel "Grey Eminence" about a climate-change artist, and her eight translators have been summoned to Poland to render her masterpiece into other languages: English, Spanish, German, French, Ukrainian, Serbian, Slovenian and Swedish. When Rey disappears, they stumble Irina-less through Białowieża Forest, trying to find her while pondering literature from Witold Gombrowicz to Jorge Luis Borges, encountering living metaphors like fungi (writer, translators, symbiosis, you get the idea), and living through all kinds of petty intra-group drama.
The set-up is a stage that allows Croft to map out a novel of ideas, pondering ecology, nature and human interference (hello, Tokarczuk...), the art of translation and communication between cultures and characters, artistic vanity and devotion to art, etc. pp. All of these themes are interesting and worthwhile per se, but the author is very much in love with her own concept and the various puzzle pieces and Easter eggs she has hidden here, taken both from real life and literature. The result is a lengthy, overwritten labyrinth that ultimately feels hermetic. From 50% on, I struggled severely to keep my interest in any of it. It's just too much, and somehow too cutesy while also being too meta for its own good.
I admire Croft's ambition and the theoretical concept, but a joy too read this was not: Too meandering, too unfocused, too absorbed in its own ideas.
Told in retrospect, after Rey's Nobel win in 2026, the plot is set in in 2017. Rey has just finished her latest novel "Grey Eminence" about a climate-change artist, and her eight translators have been summoned to Poland to render her masterpiece into other languages: English, Spanish, German, French, Ukrainian, Serbian, Slovenian and Swedish. When Rey disappears, they stumble Irina-less through Białowieża Forest, trying to find her while pondering literature from Witold Gombrowicz to Jorge Luis Borges, encountering living metaphors like fungi (writer, translators, symbiosis, you get the idea), and living through all kinds of petty intra-group drama.
The set-up is a stage that allows Croft to map out a novel of ideas, pondering ecology, nature and human interference (hello, Tokarczuk...), the art of translation and communication between cultures and characters, artistic vanity and devotion to art, etc. pp. All of these themes are interesting and worthwhile per se, but the author is very much in love with her own concept and the various puzzle pieces and Easter eggs she has hidden here, taken both from real life and literature. The result is a lengthy, overwritten labyrinth that ultimately feels hermetic. From 50% on, I struggled severely to keep my interest in any of it. It's just too much, and somehow too cutesy while also being too meta for its own good.
I admire Croft's ambition and the theoretical concept, but a joy too read this was not: Too meandering, too unfocused, too absorbed in its own ideas.
July 18, 2024
We treated her every word as sacred, even though our whole task was to replace her every word.
The Extinction of Irena Rey is the 2nd novel (or the 1st according to her US publisher, who treated Homesick as a memoir) by Jennifer Croft, who, inter alia, is one of the translators of Olga Tokarczuk.
My own photo of Croft and Tokarczuk after I awarded them the Shadow Jury Prize for the International Booker in 2018:
The duo went on to win the official International Booker Prize the next day, but perhaps became most to prominence whrn Tokarczuk won the Nobel Prize for 2018, awarded in 2019.
I say that not to detract from Croft's many other achievements, but rather for its relevance for this novel. Croft has spoken of both the strong community spirit between Tokarczuk's translators, and also the reverence they all have for the novelist, who invited many of them to the Nobel ceremony.
Croft and Tokarczuk are pictured here with Lennart Ilke and Jan Henrik Swahn, Tatiana Izotova, Antonia Lloyd-Jones, Margot Carlier, Petr Vidlak, Greet Pauwelijn, Maryna Szoda and Olga Baginska-Shinzato. Or as the eponymous fellow Polish Nobel Prize contender Irena Rey would call them: Swedish and Swedish, Russian, English, French, Czech, Dutch, Belarusian and Portuguese.
The Books of Jacob, the novel that the Nobel Committee cited as 'her magnum opus so far', was also the book that triggered Croft's campaign for publishers to put the translator's name on the cover of the book and her own decision to refuse to translate a novel without that promise (one the UK publisher of her translations of Tokarczuk's novels has so far not been prepared to accommodate).
The story in The Extinction of Irena Rey is set in seven weeks in Autumn 2017. On September 20, eight translators arrive at the home of the novelist Irena Rey in the Polish side of the Białowieża Forest. They are there for a residential group translation session of her new, and unpublished, novel Szara eminencja ('Grey Eminence' in English).
We worshipped Our Author, and when she sent us an email telling us her masterpiece was done, we canceled our plans and packed our bags and flew from our cities to Warsaw, where, bedraggled and ecstatic, we took the train into town and boarded the bus for Białowieża. It was our seventh pilgrimage to the village at the edge of the primeval forest where she lived. She had always lived there, five miles from the Belarusian border. She loved that forest as much as we loved her books, which, without a fraction of a second’s hesitation, we would have laid down our lives to defend. We treated her every word as sacred, even though our whole task was to replace her every word.
They represent the languages English, Spanish, German, French, Ukranian, Serbian, Slovenian and Swedish. A previous member of the group, Czech has died mysteriously since the last Irena Rey novel. As per above the author simply refers to them by their language, and that's the way they initially refer to each other. 'Swedish' is the newest member of the party, added to the roster to ensure the Committee in Stockholm has full access to the work:
Swedish was new, handsome as a red deer, and we knew at first sight that he would be her favorite. Not only because of the prestige of his language, a conduit to her inevitable Nobel Prize, but also because of his saunter, his stance, that gratifying invitation in his hot blue eyes.
The account we're reading is (in a meta-fictional sense) an autofictional novelisation of the events of that period, written many years later after Irena Rey finally wins the 'inevitable' Nobel in 2026.
Or rather that's the original of the account we're reading, which was written, oddly in Polish rather than her native Argentinian-Spanish, by 'Spanish', who we later learn is called Emilia Ambrogi, Emi for short, and who titled her novel Amadou (which in the real-world was also Croft's working title for the novel).
What we're actually reading, complete with a translator's foreword (or rather a Translator's Warning) and footnotes, is the English translation of that book, by 'English', an American called Alexis, written in 2027. And Alexis and Emi are no fans of each other, meaning that Alexis's footnotes are, while sometimes helpful, more commonly sarcastic rejoinders or alternative accounts of what happened.
Croft is also having some further fun with the Emi / Alexis rivalry as they seem to both have parts of her - Croft is Tokarczuk's American English translator, but learned Spanish in Buenos Aires, and also translates from Argentine Spanish (and only that dialect of Spanish) into English, alongside from Polish and Ukranian.
Although both Olga Tokarczuk (named as one of the contenders alongside Rey to have written the 'great Polish novel' and as a fellow Nobel Prize winner) and Croft (unnamed but referred to as author of a strange book called Snakes and Ladders written for some reason in Argentine Spanish by the U.S. translator of Olga Tokarczuk - Serpientes y escaleras was the original book on which Homesick was based) appear as real, if peripheral, figures in the novel.
Before we even get into Alexis's translation of Emi's account Alexis warns us:
This has been the hardest book I’ve ever had to translate. Since trust is crucial to every stage of the translation process, I feel I owe it to the English-language reader to explain.
First: One of Extinction’s main characters is based on me. Should you choose to keep reading, how uncomfortable this was for me to translate will be clear as crystal. Then again, as someone who dedicates a lot of thought to word choice, I realize “uncomfortable” might not be quite the right word. It was uncomfortable to read a version of myself I couldn’t recognize. But translation isn’t reading. Translation is being forced to write a book again. The Extinction of Irena Rey required me to recreate myself as the worst person in the narrator’s world, the monster who seems to want to ruin everything.
She also explains, rather ominously: Part of the plot is inspired by true events, and although I can’t say which part, I can say that my partner is a lawyer—an excellent lawyer, with extensive experience in criminal defense—and that we live in Mongolia, which has no extradition treaty with Poland, or, for that matter, the United States.
The story that follows is a rather convoluted one where Irena Rey first takes her translators into the primeval forest and makes some rather odd comments then promptly disappears. Her translators then get increasingly somewhat hysterical looking for her, as well as busy having sex and trying to kill each other, with meanwhile the ancient forest being chopped down around them and a mysterious archer firing arrows at people.
The novel also contains various pictures taken by the characters or posted, mysteriously, on the author's Instagram account (but by who?). Jennifer Croft's own website contains Emilia Ambrogi's secret Instagram account with photographs such as this of the ominous signs the neighbours put up on their fences shortly after the translators arrive (the messages read "If he doesn't bite you, I'll shoot you)
We noticed that Our Author’s neighbors had put up signs across their fence. All the signs were warnings against trespassing, images of German shepherds or revolvers with different Polish versions of keep out! The words were written in white or black letters on navy or bright yellow backgrounds, some of them emphasized in red. As translators, we were aware of already interloping, and as foreigners in a small but prideful nation, we took these warnings to heart.
And as the first Thursday in October approaches, the excitement among the translators, and the local press, rises as they wait for the inevitable decision from Stockholm, falling prey to a hoax that has elements both of the prank successfully played on John Banville in 2019 (the year Tokarczuk and Handke won after he'd been expecting to hear his name) and of the Filippo Bernardini fraud.
This is a fun but also an odd book to read - Emi seems more concerned about trying to seduce Freddie ('Swedish') and her rivalry with Alexis as she is with the whereabouts of Our Author - and her narration can be rather superficial. As Alexis warns us:
Maybe translation does blur the boundaries of selfhood, as this novel suggests, but if so, then it also blurs the boundaries of otherness, which this story, with its inexplicable fixation on one (admittedly attractive) man, seems completely unequipped to comprehend.
And the story she weaves is a rather preposterous one - lots of hysterical rushing around in the forest at times for no obvious reason. At one point one character asks what exactly they are doing and why they don't just all go home and gets the response surely it was the best thing we could do for the novel - by which the interlocutor means Grey Eminence, but could also mean for the sake of the plot of the book we're reading.
And while of course in the novel's meta-fictional world Emi's account is supposed to be 'unequipped to comprehend' subtlety, it does constitute much of the work we're reading.
On the other hand, the portrayal of the Białowieża Forest, its rich history and its rich mycelium-based ecosystem, is impressive - erudite and informative, but also poetic:
To my left, I saw smoke rising, and I strayed a little from the path. Beams of light that were so bright they seemed opaque, almost solid, embraceable, had touched down upon a mossy stump. The rest of the tree lay in the grass, the exposed wood rough as though after an explosion—just as Petra had seen in her dream. I squatted beside it, searching for the fire. But there was no fire, and the smoke must have just been steam, abundant and unfurling, the metamorphosing dew the moss had gathered overnight. I watched it a while: It was beautiful, but it was also disturbing. I decided to take a picture, not to keep as a souvenir, but to study later, after I was fully awake.
And Croft (and Alexis) uses the story to make many metaphorical points about translation, as she explained in this podcast from Beyond the Zero and this interview in the NY Times:
Thanks to the publisher via Netgalley for the ARC
The Extinction of Irena Rey is the 2nd novel (or the 1st according to her US publisher, who treated Homesick as a memoir) by Jennifer Croft, who, inter alia, is one of the translators of Olga Tokarczuk.
My own photo of Croft and Tokarczuk after I awarded them the Shadow Jury Prize for the International Booker in 2018:
The duo went on to win the official International Booker Prize the next day, but perhaps became most to prominence whrn Tokarczuk won the Nobel Prize for 2018, awarded in 2019.
I say that not to detract from Croft's many other achievements, but rather for its relevance for this novel. Croft has spoken of both the strong community spirit between Tokarczuk's translators, and also the reverence they all have for the novelist, who invited many of them to the Nobel ceremony.
Croft and Tokarczuk are pictured here with Lennart Ilke and Jan Henrik Swahn, Tatiana Izotova, Antonia Lloyd-Jones, Margot Carlier, Petr Vidlak, Greet Pauwelijn, Maryna Szoda and Olga Baginska-Shinzato. Or as the eponymous fellow Polish Nobel Prize contender Irena Rey would call them: Swedish and Swedish, Russian, English, French, Czech, Dutch, Belarusian and Portuguese.
The Books of Jacob, the novel that the Nobel Committee cited as 'her magnum opus so far', was also the book that triggered Croft's campaign for publishers to put the translator's name on the cover of the book and her own decision to refuse to translate a novel without that promise (one the UK publisher of her translations of Tokarczuk's novels has so far not been prepared to accommodate).
The story in The Extinction of Irena Rey is set in seven weeks in Autumn 2017. On September 20, eight translators arrive at the home of the novelist Irena Rey in the Polish side of the Białowieża Forest. They are there for a residential group translation session of her new, and unpublished, novel Szara eminencja ('Grey Eminence' in English).
We worshipped Our Author, and when she sent us an email telling us her masterpiece was done, we canceled our plans and packed our bags and flew from our cities to Warsaw, where, bedraggled and ecstatic, we took the train into town and boarded the bus for Białowieża. It was our seventh pilgrimage to the village at the edge of the primeval forest where she lived. She had always lived there, five miles from the Belarusian border. She loved that forest as much as we loved her books, which, without a fraction of a second’s hesitation, we would have laid down our lives to defend. We treated her every word as sacred, even though our whole task was to replace her every word.
They represent the languages English, Spanish, German, French, Ukranian, Serbian, Slovenian and Swedish. A previous member of the group, Czech has died mysteriously since the last Irena Rey novel. As per above the author simply refers to them by their language, and that's the way they initially refer to each other. 'Swedish' is the newest member of the party, added to the roster to ensure the Committee in Stockholm has full access to the work:
Swedish was new, handsome as a red deer, and we knew at first sight that he would be her favorite. Not only because of the prestige of his language, a conduit to her inevitable Nobel Prize, but also because of his saunter, his stance, that gratifying invitation in his hot blue eyes.
The account we're reading is (in a meta-fictional sense) an autofictional novelisation of the events of that period, written many years later after Irena Rey finally wins the 'inevitable' Nobel in 2026.
Or rather that's the original of the account we're reading, which was written, oddly in Polish rather than her native Argentinian-Spanish, by 'Spanish', who we later learn is called Emilia Ambrogi, Emi for short, and who titled her novel Amadou (which in the real-world was also Croft's working title for the novel).
What we're actually reading, complete with a translator's foreword (or rather a Translator's Warning) and footnotes, is the English translation of that book, by 'English', an American called Alexis, written in 2027. And Alexis and Emi are no fans of each other, meaning that Alexis's footnotes are, while sometimes helpful, more commonly sarcastic rejoinders or alternative accounts of what happened.
Croft is also having some further fun with the Emi / Alexis rivalry as they seem to both have parts of her - Croft is Tokarczuk's American English translator, but learned Spanish in Buenos Aires, and also translates from Argentine Spanish (and only that dialect of Spanish) into English, alongside from Polish and Ukranian.
Although both Olga Tokarczuk (named as one of the contenders alongside Rey to have written the 'great Polish novel' and as a fellow Nobel Prize winner) and Croft (unnamed but referred to as author of a strange book called Snakes and Ladders written for some reason in Argentine Spanish by the U.S. translator of Olga Tokarczuk - Serpientes y escaleras was the original book on which Homesick was based) appear as real, if peripheral, figures in the novel.
Before we even get into Alexis's translation of Emi's account Alexis warns us:
This has been the hardest book I’ve ever had to translate. Since trust is crucial to every stage of the translation process, I feel I owe it to the English-language reader to explain.
First: One of Extinction’s main characters is based on me. Should you choose to keep reading, how uncomfortable this was for me to translate will be clear as crystal. Then again, as someone who dedicates a lot of thought to word choice, I realize “uncomfortable” might not be quite the right word. It was uncomfortable to read a version of myself I couldn’t recognize. But translation isn’t reading. Translation is being forced to write a book again. The Extinction of Irena Rey required me to recreate myself as the worst person in the narrator’s world, the monster who seems to want to ruin everything.
She also explains, rather ominously: Part of the plot is inspired by true events, and although I can’t say which part, I can say that my partner is a lawyer—an excellent lawyer, with extensive experience in criminal defense—and that we live in Mongolia, which has no extradition treaty with Poland, or, for that matter, the United States.
The story that follows is a rather convoluted one where Irena Rey first takes her translators into the primeval forest and makes some rather odd comments then promptly disappears. Her translators then get increasingly somewhat hysterical looking for her, as well as busy having sex and trying to kill each other, with meanwhile the ancient forest being chopped down around them and a mysterious archer firing arrows at people.
The novel also contains various pictures taken by the characters or posted, mysteriously, on the author's Instagram account (but by who?). Jennifer Croft's own website contains Emilia Ambrogi's secret Instagram account with photographs such as this of the ominous signs the neighbours put up on their fences shortly after the translators arrive (the messages read "If he doesn't bite you, I'll shoot you)
We noticed that Our Author’s neighbors had put up signs across their fence. All the signs were warnings against trespassing, images of German shepherds or revolvers with different Polish versions of keep out! The words were written in white or black letters on navy or bright yellow backgrounds, some of them emphasized in red. As translators, we were aware of already interloping, and as foreigners in a small but prideful nation, we took these warnings to heart.
And as the first Thursday in October approaches, the excitement among the translators, and the local press, rises as they wait for the inevitable decision from Stockholm, falling prey to a hoax that has elements both of the prank successfully played on John Banville in 2019 (the year Tokarczuk and Handke won after he'd been expecting to hear his name) and of the Filippo Bernardini fraud.
This is a fun but also an odd book to read - Emi seems more concerned about trying to seduce Freddie ('Swedish') and her rivalry with Alexis as she is with the whereabouts of Our Author - and her narration can be rather superficial. As Alexis warns us:
Maybe translation does blur the boundaries of selfhood, as this novel suggests, but if so, then it also blurs the boundaries of otherness, which this story, with its inexplicable fixation on one (admittedly attractive) man, seems completely unequipped to comprehend.
And the story she weaves is a rather preposterous one - lots of hysterical rushing around in the forest at times for no obvious reason. At one point one character asks what exactly they are doing and why they don't just all go home and gets the response surely it was the best thing we could do for the novel - by which the interlocutor means Grey Eminence, but could also mean for the sake of the plot of the book we're reading.
And while of course in the novel's meta-fictional world Emi's account is supposed to be 'unequipped to comprehend' subtlety, it does constitute much of the work we're reading.
On the other hand, the portrayal of the Białowieża Forest, its rich history and its rich mycelium-based ecosystem, is impressive - erudite and informative, but also poetic:
To my left, I saw smoke rising, and I strayed a little from the path. Beams of light that were so bright they seemed opaque, almost solid, embraceable, had touched down upon a mossy stump. The rest of the tree lay in the grass, the exposed wood rough as though after an explosion—just as Petra had seen in her dream. I squatted beside it, searching for the fire. But there was no fire, and the smoke must have just been steam, abundant and unfurling, the metamorphosing dew the moss had gathered overnight. I watched it a while: It was beautiful, but it was also disturbing. I decided to take a picture, not to keep as a souvenir, but to study later, after I was fully awake.
And Croft (and Alexis) uses the story to make many metaphorical points about translation, as she explained in this podcast from Beyond the Zero and this interview in the NY Times:
The central metaphor in “The Extinction” is amadou, a once widespread product of the fungus Fomes fomentarius, which starts its life as a parasite but becomes, after killing its host tree, a decomposer. As such, it enriches the soil and ensures the ongoing vitality of the forest.
Translators overwrite originals, making texts in other languages visible and invisible at once. Without translators, literary traditions and even languages might rot in isolation. With translators, the literary ecosystem keeps up the diversity it needs in order to flourish. Fomes fomentarius embodies the clash between alarming and awe-inspiring that I think makes translation unique among literary forms.
Thanks to the publisher via Netgalley for the ARC
Read
February 22, 2024I genuinely do not know how to rate this. Not even sure if I actually liked this book or not because it was so strange. Can't believe Jennifer Croft wrote a whole book about how much she loves Olga Tokarczuk which is quite iconic to be honest but also the book was a bit like what the fuck.
I love Croft's work in translation and I loved her previous book Homesick which was on the Women's Prize longlist last year, and this book is a homage to the fun of translation and to the relationship between the author and their translators across the world. The book is about Irena Rey, an esteemed Polish author who lives in a remote forest in Poland and is in the middle of her magnum opus. She invites her translators across the world to come and stay with her in her secluded house. The translators are all super weird and call each other not by their names but by their languages (English, Czech, German). Not long after they get there, Irena disappears and no one knows where she's gone. The translators think they might have accidentally killed her, or maybe she's run away intending for them to find her, or maybe she's been kidnapped?
This entire book was just surreal and felt a bit of a mess at the beginning. The dialogue between the translators was really strange and felt a bit too 'staged' to be believable at points. The entire book feels like a fever dream but not in a way which has that intense, claustrophobic atmosphere. The whole story is actually quite relaxed, in a strange way. The translators go out to dinner, they make friends with the weird archer who has been shooting at them through the woods, they dress up as different authors for Halloween and go on walks through the forest to gather mushrooms to make for tonight's risotto. It felt like absolutely nothing was happening but also a bunch of strange and irrelevant things were at the same time. The first 30% had me wondering what the actual fuck was going on and why all these weird translators were just hanging out in the house of their missing author and not doing anything.
The novel does circle back to the 'mystery' eventually and the authors get into some drama involving the Nobel Prize and the translation of her new novel which they do actually manage to work on in between all the drama and hooking up they do inside Irena's house. But it takes so long to get to any sort of unravelling of any mystery plot that it really makes me question what the point of all this was?
In the acknowledgements, Croft cites that the book was inspired partly by Tokarczuk's relationship with her translators. It's a cleverly structured novel in that there is a 'translator's note' at the beginning, however this 'translator' is actually just a character and the reader must assume the 'book' has either been written in Polish or Spanish and has been translated by an anonymous third party, who leaves footnotes through-out the book (they're not really House of Leaves style footnotes though, just kind of observations sometimes and other times explaining etymology). It felt at the end that Croft was writing a homage to Tokarczuk with the surrealist feel of the novel compared to Tokarczuk's own style, with Croft intending for the core 'book' to be a parody almost of one of her books and the 'translator' being Croft herself maybe, but this is just a thought and I don't know if it's what Croft intended.
The more I think about this book the more confused I get. It's such a feat to think about and there is so much to dissect in it. But did I enjoy it? I don't really know. I felt like giving up at so many times during it. The group of translators are just all so weird there is not really space for any emotional depth in the novel and it has a strong satirical and fictional feel to it that it never really made me like it at all. I don't know how to rate it because I've got so many mixed feelings and thoughts so I'm just going to leave it as it is.
If you're interested in translators and the act of translation and enjoy a bit of metafiction then you might enjoy it and might like it more than me. But there was something so distinctly off about this book for me that I don't think I can say I fully liked it.
I love Croft's work in translation and I loved her previous book Homesick which was on the Women's Prize longlist last year, and this book is a homage to the fun of translation and to the relationship between the author and their translators across the world. The book is about Irena Rey, an esteemed Polish author who lives in a remote forest in Poland and is in the middle of her magnum opus. She invites her translators across the world to come and stay with her in her secluded house. The translators are all super weird and call each other not by their names but by their languages (English, Czech, German). Not long after they get there, Irena disappears and no one knows where she's gone. The translators think they might have accidentally killed her, or maybe she's run away intending for them to find her, or maybe she's been kidnapped?
This entire book was just surreal and felt a bit of a mess at the beginning. The dialogue between the translators was really strange and felt a bit too 'staged' to be believable at points. The entire book feels like a fever dream but not in a way which has that intense, claustrophobic atmosphere. The whole story is actually quite relaxed, in a strange way. The translators go out to dinner, they make friends with the weird archer who has been shooting at them through the woods, they dress up as different authors for Halloween and go on walks through the forest to gather mushrooms to make for tonight's risotto. It felt like absolutely nothing was happening but also a bunch of strange and irrelevant things were at the same time. The first 30% had me wondering what the actual fuck was going on and why all these weird translators were just hanging out in the house of their missing author and not doing anything.
The novel does circle back to the 'mystery' eventually and the authors get into some drama involving the Nobel Prize and the translation of her new novel which they do actually manage to work on in between all the drama and hooking up they do inside Irena's house. But it takes so long to get to any sort of unravelling of any mystery plot that it really makes me question what the point of all this was?
In the acknowledgements, Croft cites that the book was inspired partly by Tokarczuk's relationship with her translators. It's a cleverly structured novel in that there is a 'translator's note' at the beginning, however this 'translator' is actually just a character and the reader must assume the 'book' has either been written in Polish or Spanish and has been translated by an anonymous third party, who leaves footnotes through-out the book (they're not really House of Leaves style footnotes though, just kind of observations sometimes and other times explaining etymology). It felt at the end that Croft was writing a homage to Tokarczuk with the surrealist feel of the novel compared to Tokarczuk's own style, with Croft intending for the core 'book' to be a parody almost of one of her books and the 'translator' being Croft herself maybe, but this is just a thought and I don't know if it's what Croft intended.
The more I think about this book the more confused I get. It's such a feat to think about and there is so much to dissect in it. But did I enjoy it? I don't really know. I felt like giving up at so many times during it. The group of translators are just all so weird there is not really space for any emotional depth in the novel and it has a strong satirical and fictional feel to it that it never really made me like it at all. I don't know how to rate it because I've got so many mixed feelings and thoughts so I'm just going to leave it as it is.
If you're interested in translators and the act of translation and enjoy a bit of metafiction then you might enjoy it and might like it more than me. But there was something so distinctly off about this book for me that I don't think I can say I fully liked it.
April 17, 2024
4.5
Who knew translators were so needy and horny
------
Thanks to Bloomsbury Books US for the gifted ARC
It's a great day when you get to read one of your most anticipated releases and you end up loving it. It's also amazing when you realize that a translator you respect, is not only smart, but also funny, and, maybe, just a wee bit weird. That's how I would describe this book at least, except maybe up the weirdness factor.
This book is a satirical mystery - what happens when a group of translators gather to work on the magnum opus of 'their author', but a day into their symposium she ups and disappears. Mayhem apparently. Without their 'lady of literature' they are lost and can barely function. They decide to stay in Białowieża, translate the novel without her guidance while they try to search for her, have a few parties, attempt to halt deforestation, and try not to get murdered.
The thing is we're reading about these accounts ten years later from Emi's, the Spanish translator, autofictional novel which was written in Polish (???) and is now translated by the English translator Alexis. This becomes hilarious as Emi has issues with Alexis, so Alexis is constantly adding footnotes to the novel commenting on Emi. Shots are constantly fired.
I may make this sound convoluted, but if it is, it's in the best way. I couldn't put this book down because I wanted to see what else we learn about Irena, what other weird things can this group get into, [is this how a group of translators would behave? (I think I found out my answer this week 👀)], and, more importantly to me, what ideas on translation and transformation would come about.
This is the heart of the novel, how a translator makes works available to us. There's this tension between the visible and invisible and permanence and mutability in translation. We expect a translation to be true even though it's a transformation of sorts, but, unlike the original work, a translation can be replaced. I thought the ideas on language were beautifully written along with the symbiotic relationship between author and translator reflected in the primeval forest with its network of mycelium.
Who knew translators were so needy and horny
------
Thanks to Bloomsbury Books US for the gifted ARC
It's a great day when you get to read one of your most anticipated releases and you end up loving it. It's also amazing when you realize that a translator you respect, is not only smart, but also funny, and, maybe, just a wee bit weird. That's how I would describe this book at least, except maybe up the weirdness factor.
This book is a satirical mystery - what happens when a group of translators gather to work on the magnum opus of 'their author', but a day into their symposium she ups and disappears. Mayhem apparently. Without their 'lady of literature' they are lost and can barely function. They decide to stay in Białowieża, translate the novel without her guidance while they try to search for her, have a few parties, attempt to halt deforestation, and try not to get murdered.
The thing is we're reading about these accounts ten years later from Emi's, the Spanish translator, autofictional novel which was written in Polish (???) and is now translated by the English translator Alexis. This becomes hilarious as Emi has issues with Alexis, so Alexis is constantly adding footnotes to the novel commenting on Emi. Shots are constantly fired.
I may make this sound convoluted, but if it is, it's in the best way. I couldn't put this book down because I wanted to see what else we learn about Irena, what other weird things can this group get into, [is this how a group of translators would behave? (I think I found out my answer this week 👀)], and, more importantly to me, what ideas on translation and transformation would come about.
This is the heart of the novel, how a translator makes works available to us. There's this tension between the visible and invisible and permanence and mutability in translation. We expect a translation to be true even though it's a transformation of sorts, but, unlike the original work, a translation can be replaced. I thought the ideas on language were beautifully written along with the symbiotic relationship between author and translator reflected in the primeval forest with its network of mycelium.
September 15, 2023
You're going to want to read this book. And then you're going to want to reread it.
July 30, 2024
This book is really weird. I wasn’t going to rate and certainly not write a review as I fear it went over my head. However, it was a fun, positive experience for me and I should make note of that. I was confounded but never bored!
Irena Rey, a famous Polish author, is holding a summit at her home and eight of her favored translators are staying with her to work on translating her newest novel. The translators at first are called by their native language instead of their given names.
Irena disappears. Is it on purpose or did someone kidnap her?
The story is told from the perspective of the Spanish translator (but translated into English by the English translator). Oh by the way, Spanish does not get along with English. Due to Swedish, a man that Spanish wants all to herself. Peppered in the text are various footnotes that either clear up or muddy the waters about all of this.
The story unfolds as to what the group does to either find Irena or to find out what happened to her. It gets crazy.
I can tell Jennifer Croft is a fine writer and must be a terrific translator, hence the four stars. I did admire her command of language within the text.
Irena Rey, a famous Polish author, is holding a summit at her home and eight of her favored translators are staying with her to work on translating her newest novel. The translators at first are called by their native language instead of their given names.
Irena disappears. Is it on purpose or did someone kidnap her?
The story is told from the perspective of the Spanish translator (but translated into English by the English translator). Oh by the way, Spanish does not get along with English. Due to Swedish, a man that Spanish wants all to herself. Peppered in the text are various footnotes that either clear up or muddy the waters about all of this.
The story unfolds as to what the group does to either find Irena or to find out what happened to her. It gets crazy.
I can tell Jennifer Croft is a fine writer and must be a terrific translator, hence the four stars. I did admire her command of language within the text.
Read
May 19, 2024An unusual, inventive book that will appeal to a very niche audience.
This book features in my Spring TBR video on BookTube.🌷
👉 I read 206 pages, skimmed/jumped through 80 pages, then settled in to read the final chapters.
I LOVED the first 70 pages of this book. The opening chapters are strange, mystifying, and masterfully crafted to exude a deep sense of ritual and cult-like reverence for Irena Rey. The book could have gone on like that for another 1,000 pages and I'd have taken it all in slowly and with pleasure.
But after 70 pages, the book transforms into . . . something else. The blurb promises a story of eight translators exploring an ancient, wooded refuge among intoxicating slime molds and lichens, and it's sort of about that but not really, as the translators venture in and out of town throughout the book. The sense of being hidden away in a primeval Polish forest quickly dissolves.
However, I applaud Jennifer Croft's inventive approach to telling stories. Both her previous book, Homesick , and The Extinction of Irena Rey blend photographs with real history as well as fiction. The result feels like something new, though it also makes for vague categorization (e.g., Homesick was marketed as a memoir in the US but as fiction in the UK).
I also love that The Extinction of Irena Rey is a story within a story because the book is "written" by the Spanish translator in the book (Emilia aka "Emi") but was "translated" by the English translator in the book (Alexis), who includes footnotes with relevant facts as well as her intrusive thoughts. See what I mean? Inventive!
Check this one out if your looking for something that ventures into the absurd, is woven with real facts, and reads like a bizarre homage to the art of translation.
--
ORIGINAL POST 👇
One of my most anticipated reads of 2024, and early reviews are . . . mixed. Nonetheless, I'm eager to read this book because the premise is so unusual: Eight translators from different countries go to a house in the primeval Polish forest where they intend to translate the magnum opus of writer Irena Rey, who goes missing just days after their arrival.
After Irena's disappearance, the translators "explore this ancient wooded refuge with its intoxicating slime molds and lichens and study her exotic belongings and layered texts for clues" in hopes of finding her.
I've been in the mood for unusual and inventive books lately, so I'll be reading this one sooner than later.
This book features in my Spring TBR video on BookTube.🌷
👉 I read 206 pages, skimmed/jumped through 80 pages, then settled in to read the final chapters.
I LOVED the first 70 pages of this book. The opening chapters are strange, mystifying, and masterfully crafted to exude a deep sense of ritual and cult-like reverence for Irena Rey. The book could have gone on like that for another 1,000 pages and I'd have taken it all in slowly and with pleasure.
But after 70 pages, the book transforms into . . . something else. The blurb promises a story of eight translators exploring an ancient, wooded refuge among intoxicating slime molds and lichens, and it's sort of about that but not really, as the translators venture in and out of town throughout the book. The sense of being hidden away in a primeval Polish forest quickly dissolves.
However, I applaud Jennifer Croft's inventive approach to telling stories. Both her previous book, Homesick , and The Extinction of Irena Rey blend photographs with real history as well as fiction. The result feels like something new, though it also makes for vague categorization (e.g., Homesick was marketed as a memoir in the US but as fiction in the UK).
I also love that The Extinction of Irena Rey is a story within a story because the book is "written" by the Spanish translator in the book (Emilia aka "Emi") but was "translated" by the English translator in the book (Alexis), who includes footnotes with relevant facts as well as her intrusive thoughts. See what I mean? Inventive!
Check this one out if your looking for something that ventures into the absurd, is woven with real facts, and reads like a bizarre homage to the art of translation.
--
ORIGINAL POST 👇
One of my most anticipated reads of 2024, and early reviews are . . . mixed. Nonetheless, I'm eager to read this book because the premise is so unusual: Eight translators from different countries go to a house in the primeval Polish forest where they intend to translate the magnum opus of writer Irena Rey, who goes missing just days after their arrival.
After Irena's disappearance, the translators "explore this ancient wooded refuge with its intoxicating slime molds and lichens and study her exotic belongings and layered texts for clues" in hopes of finding her.
I've been in the mood for unusual and inventive books lately, so I'll be reading this one sooner than later.
April 27, 2024
I loved this. Not everyone will, especially those who prefer their fiction straightforward. This is anything but.
I’ve been aware of Jennifer Croft since reading her translation of Olga Tokarczk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. As I recall, I commented in my review that it was worth waiting 10 years for the English translation because Croft had done such a brilliant job.
Correction: Jennifer Croft did not translate Drive Your Plow. That was Antonia Lloyd-Jones. Croft began translating for Tokarczyk with Flights, for which she and Tokarczyk each won the Booker. She has also translated The Books of Jacob
So naturally I had high expectations for this book, and I’m pleased to report that they were met. About that “straightforward” comment: the novel concerns events surrounding 8 translators of the works of a renowned Polish author, while they are assembled at her home on the edge of a primeval forest, prepared to work on translating her as-yet-unseen magnum opus into their various languages. It is written in Polish, 10 years after the fact, from the POV of the Spanish translator. But we read the English translation, which has been prepared by the same woman who was one of the original 8. Oh, and in the first part of the story these individuals are known only by their languages (English, Spanish, French, Serbian, etc). Later on their true names are introduced. Kind of like Tudor historical fiction when sometimes the character is William Cecil and sometimes he’s Burghley.
So, a wee bit confusing at the beginning. I listen to a lot of audiobooks with unusual structures or characters and I rarely have difficulty keeping things sorted out, but this one seemed to have unique challenges requiring me to pay extremely close attention. (Not once, but twice, while reading this I actually lost track of where I was going while driving around on errands and had to backtrack to get everything done.)
In fairness to my audio reading capabilities, it wasn’t just the characters and narrative structure that could be confusing, it was all the ideas and issues Croft has packed in. Most of these are connected in some way to that endangered old growth forest and its flora and fauna, but there is plenty of 20th century history and cultural conflict as well. And of course, the role and power of translators in sharing authors’ works with a wider audience.
My intention has not by any means been to put you off this book. It’s just that I’m aware that not everyone enjoys books with unreliable narrators and crowded plots and shifting ideas. And I’m glad that I decided to take advantage of some downtime today to give the book my full attention in its final third.
I’ve been aware of Jennifer Croft since reading her translation of Olga Tokarczk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. As I recall, I commented in my review that it was worth waiting 10 years for the English translation because Croft had done such a brilliant job.
Correction: Jennifer Croft did not translate Drive Your Plow. That was Antonia Lloyd-Jones. Croft began translating for Tokarczyk with Flights, for which she and Tokarczyk each won the Booker. She has also translated The Books of Jacob
So naturally I had high expectations for this book, and I’m pleased to report that they were met. About that “straightforward” comment: the novel concerns events surrounding 8 translators of the works of a renowned Polish author, while they are assembled at her home on the edge of a primeval forest, prepared to work on translating her as-yet-unseen magnum opus into their various languages. It is written in Polish, 10 years after the fact, from the POV of the Spanish translator. But we read the English translation, which has been prepared by the same woman who was one of the original 8. Oh, and in the first part of the story these individuals are known only by their languages (English, Spanish, French, Serbian, etc). Later on their true names are introduced. Kind of like Tudor historical fiction when sometimes the character is William Cecil and sometimes he’s Burghley.
So, a wee bit confusing at the beginning. I listen to a lot of audiobooks with unusual structures or characters and I rarely have difficulty keeping things sorted out, but this one seemed to have unique challenges requiring me to pay extremely close attention. (Not once, but twice, while reading this I actually lost track of where I was going while driving around on errands and had to backtrack to get everything done.)
In fairness to my audio reading capabilities, it wasn’t just the characters and narrative structure that could be confusing, it was all the ideas and issues Croft has packed in. Most of these are connected in some way to that endangered old growth forest and its flora and fauna, but there is plenty of 20th century history and cultural conflict as well. And of course, the role and power of translators in sharing authors’ works with a wider audience.
My intention has not by any means been to put you off this book. It’s just that I’m aware that not everyone enjoys books with unreliable narrators and crowded plots and shifting ideas. And I’m glad that I decided to take advantage of some downtime today to give the book my full attention in its final third.
March 5, 2024
Unreliable Author & Translator Mystery Fun
Review of the Bloomsbury Publishing hardcover & eBook (March 5, 2024) read via a NetGalley Kindle ARC (downloaded February 14, 2024).
You may be familiar with the unreliable narrator trope in literature but what if the author and their translators themselves are the unreliable ones? The Extinction of Irena Rey finds eight translators attending a translator ‘summit’ at the residence of their star Polish author Irena Rey in the primeval forest in Białowieża, Poland nearby to the border with Belarus. They are there to supposedly translate the author’s 10th work and expected magnum opus Grey Eminence, but soon after their arrival the author disappears. Can the translators be relied upon to accurately complete their work unsupervised?
Initially the translators are named only by their languages, so we meet the characters: English, Spanish, Swedish, German, French, Serbian, Slovenian and Ukrainian. Soon we learn their names, of which Emilia (aka Spanish) and Alexis (aka English) are most prominent. The whole book is Emilia’s memoir of the 2017 summit, written in Polish and translated in English by Alexis a decade after the event. Emilia sees Alexis as a rival however, due to competing translation styles but also for the affection of Freddie (aka Swedish). Events spiral out of control with attempted assassinations, pistols at dawn duels, false flag instagrams and author impersonations piling on until a cross-country journey leads to a final revelation.
Crazed lustful translators who battle with other translators eager to assume the identity of their mutual author make for one bizarre and fun literary novel. There is the especial delight of the often sardonic footnotes provided by Alexis who thereby seeks to correct her portrayal as the villainess translator by Emilia. The whole package is enhanced by obviously being a comic satire inspired by Croft’s own real-life experiences translating eminent Polish author Olga Tokarczuk and their mutual win of the 2018 International Booker Prize leading up to Tokarczuk’s 2018 Nobel Prize for Literature. Tokarczuk’s own ‘magnum opus’ The Books of Jacob (2014) appeared soon after in English translation by Croft in 2021.
My thanks to author Jennifer Croft, publisher Bloomsbury Publishing and NetGalley for the opportunity to read this preview ARC, in exchange for which I provide this honest review.
Footnote
* In a wink at the tendency of some publishers to change book titles in translation, The Extinction of Irena Rey is the fictional translator's new name for the original work titled Amadou.
Other Reviews
Eight Translators Lost in a Forest by Carey O’Grady, The Guardian, March 2, 2024.
Soundtrack
I didn’t have to look very far at all for this one. Direct from the author’s acknowledgements is listed “an album titled The Suspended Harp of Babel by Vox Clamantis (an Estonian choir) and Jaan-Eik Tulve (who directed the choir), which I must have listened to ten thousand times over the course of creating The Extinction of Irena Rey”.
You can listen to a sample track composed by Estonian composer Cyrillus Kreek (1889-1962) “Päeval ei pea päikene” (The Sun Shall Not Smite Thee) here.
Trivia and Link
Jennifer Croft is interviewed about the novel on NPR which you can read or listen to here on Author Interviews with Scott Simon, March 2, 2024.
Review of the Bloomsbury Publishing hardcover & eBook (March 5, 2024) read via a NetGalley Kindle ARC (downloaded February 14, 2024).
[Footnote #69] At this point it would be natural for the reader to wonder why I agreed to translate this book. My editor refused to let me have an afterword, as did this author, so I will talk about it here since not even my editor's assistant is reading the footnotes at this point.
The most pressing thing was that if I hadn't agreed to translate Amadou, someone else would have. Any translator (including this author) will tell you that one of the primary tenets of translation is to keep friends close and enemies closer. By translating Amadou*, I was able to reclaim my identity as not 100 percent evil.
Also, maybe, as Robert Frost said, poetry is what gets lost in translation. People have interpreted that phrase to mean translation is necessarily flawed and flawing, but I understand it in a different way. To me, poetry is concision, refinement - the effect of considerable loss. Lose, from any page that's filled with words, all the ones that do not matter, and you may find a kind of poem.
You may be familiar with the unreliable narrator trope in literature but what if the author and their translators themselves are the unreliable ones? The Extinction of Irena Rey finds eight translators attending a translator ‘summit’ at the residence of their star Polish author Irena Rey in the primeval forest in Białowieża, Poland nearby to the border with Belarus. They are there to supposedly translate the author’s 10th work and expected magnum opus Grey Eminence, but soon after their arrival the author disappears. Can the translators be relied upon to accurately complete their work unsupervised?
Initially the translators are named only by their languages, so we meet the characters: English, Spanish, Swedish, German, French, Serbian, Slovenian and Ukrainian. Soon we learn their names, of which Emilia (aka Spanish) and Alexis (aka English) are most prominent. The whole book is Emilia’s memoir of the 2017 summit, written in Polish and translated in English by Alexis a decade after the event. Emilia sees Alexis as a rival however, due to competing translation styles but also for the affection of Freddie (aka Swedish). Events spiral out of control with attempted assassinations, pistols at dawn duels, false flag instagrams and author impersonations piling on until a cross-country journey leads to a final revelation.
Crazed lustful translators who battle with other translators eager to assume the identity of their mutual author make for one bizarre and fun literary novel. There is the especial delight of the often sardonic footnotes provided by Alexis who thereby seeks to correct her portrayal as the villainess translator by Emilia. The whole package is enhanced by obviously being a comic satire inspired by Croft’s own real-life experiences translating eminent Polish author Olga Tokarczuk and their mutual win of the 2018 International Booker Prize leading up to Tokarczuk’s 2018 Nobel Prize for Literature. Tokarczuk’s own ‘magnum opus’ The Books of Jacob (2014) appeared soon after in English translation by Croft in 2021.
My thanks to author Jennifer Croft, publisher Bloomsbury Publishing and NetGalley for the opportunity to read this preview ARC, in exchange for which I provide this honest review.
Footnote
* In a wink at the tendency of some publishers to change book titles in translation, The Extinction of Irena Rey is the fictional translator's new name for the original work titled Amadou.
Other Reviews
Eight Translators Lost in a Forest by Carey O’Grady, The Guardian, March 2, 2024.
Soundtrack
I didn’t have to look very far at all for this one. Direct from the author’s acknowledgements is listed “an album titled The Suspended Harp of Babel by Vox Clamantis (an Estonian choir) and Jaan-Eik Tulve (who directed the choir), which I must have listened to ten thousand times over the course of creating The Extinction of Irena Rey”.
You can listen to a sample track composed by Estonian composer Cyrillus Kreek (1889-1962) “Päeval ei pea päikene” (The Sun Shall Not Smite Thee) here.
Trivia and Link
Jennifer Croft is interviewed about the novel on NPR which you can read or listen to here on Author Interviews with Scott Simon, March 2, 2024.
November 27, 2024
Instagram || Threads || Facebook || Amazon || TikTok
I picked this up from a lending library because I really liked the cover and it had a mixed media mystery format that kind of reminded me of Marisha Pessl's NIGHT FILM, which is one of my favorite books of all time.
THE EXTINCTION OF IRENA REY is a pretty bizarre book. This literary phenom of an author (compared to authors like Borges, Ishiguro, and Murakami) is in the middle of the Polish wilderness, surrounded by a summit of her translators who at first self-identify and identify each other by the languages they work on. Our narrator is Spanish, but there's also Swedish, Serbian, English, etc.
Irena Rey is about to release a new book, which is why they're all there, but instead she's acting super weird. Her husband is nowhere in sight, now she's claiming that there isn't a book, she's feeding them weird mushrooms and shit, and ceremonially dispenses these weird and creepy goodie bags that none of them can figure out.
And then she goes missing.
I liked the premise of this book a lot but it didn't feel like it knew what it wanted to be. So it ended up being one of those really strange and bizarre books where I couldn't tell if it got lost in its own mythos or if I genuinely was too stupid to figure out what was going on. I often feel this way after reading some of Mona Awad's work, so if you're a fan of that author, you may well enjoy this. I almost DNFed but I wanted to pull through just in case the ending was worth the pay-off (it was not, imo).
2.5 stars
March 17, 2024
I don't quite know what to make of this book. I was intrigued by the set-up, immediately put off and exasperated by the protagonist, and slowly but surely frustrated with all the topics that could have been explored but simply weren't. The slow descent into absurdity didn't work for me. The two layers of unreliable narrators were interesting. but I simply found both women utterly tiresome. This is not to say Croft didn't do it on purpose; it was self-aware. It simply tried to be too many things: a commentary on eco-fascism, translation, translation as a work of art, art as a destructive force, and clearly, cults. I am also itching to take cordyceps away from authors and put it up on the top shelf until they stop overusing it as a literary device. Enough is enough.
PS: Socarrat is something exclusive to paella. If there is socarrat in your risotto you did something very, very wrong.
PS: Socarrat is something exclusive to paella. If there is socarrat in your risotto you did something very, very wrong.
March 30, 2024
Eight translators come together at the home of a successful author in order to translate her latest work. To say that the translators are obsessed with the author is an understatement. After the author mysteriously disappears, along with her husband, the translators carry on, despite the weird circumstances. The story is told from the point of view of the Spanish translator, whose tale has been translated by her enemy, the English translator. I did like the snark in the footnotes written by the English translator, but neither of the women is a reliable narrator.
This book was too meta for me. I enjoyed parts of it, but mostly I found it confusing and trying too hard to be clever. At least it held my interest. 3.5 stars
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher.
This book was too meta for me. I enjoyed parts of it, but mostly I found it confusing and trying too hard to be clever. At least it held my interest. 3.5 stars
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher.
February 28, 2024
My heartfelt thanks to NetGalley and Bloomsbury Publishing for the opportunity to read the ARC in exchange for an honest review.
The novel in a nutshell: acoven murder of translators gather on the outskirts of one of the few remaining stretches of primeval forests in Europe, Białowieża, to translate the latest novel by the author they idolize. Some weeks later, they leave the retreat after having misplaced their author, solved an historical art heist, saved the forest from loggers, discovered that it's more of a cult than a translation gig or a book club, and translated the manuscript, among other things. At some point afterwards, one of the translators writes a novel about these events, and another translates it while aggressively annotating it to hell and back. If that's not perplexing enough, lemme add that there's also a mystical marriage, more fungi than you can shake a stick at, reflections on violence inscribed in Eastern European landscapes, reflections about invasive species and what can be classified as such, a faked death and a duel at dawn, partly between the domesticating and the foreignizing approaches to translation, among other things.
With footnotes as a form of violence against the narrator by the annotator who attempts to impose their own narrative on top of the text they are given, this is possibly one of the most inventively constructed novels I've read in a while. The Chinese puzzle ball structure of embedded stories clack-clacking uneasily against one another remind me of Nabokov's Pale Fire, possibly the most (in)famous case of an unreliable annotator in literature. If you enjoyed Pale Fire, or, say, Olga Tokarczuk's Dom Dzienny, Dom Nocny (or a bunch of her other novels, but thematically and vibe-wise, DDDN probably comes closest), chances are you will enjoy The Extinction of Irena Rey. Ultimately, I enjoyed it far less than I expected to simply because this particular flavor of chaos and delirium is not my cuppa (I nodded emphatically when one of the characters asked "Need I remind you that sanity has not exactly been the guiding principle since our arrival here?"—I found it a bit too hard to suspend disbelief or find a structure in all this at points), but it might be yours. For me, it was not so much plot-driven or character-driven as driven by the architecture of the text and aphorisms about the nature of translation work. Like, there'd be an agglomeration of too many themes happening at once—borders linguistic and political, violence narrative and historical, and how translation pertains to our understanding of selfhood and otherness, smuggling in strangers and invasive species in familiar guises to crack open the stuffy haunted mansions of closed cultures—or something—(it's not the text, it's my attention span)—and right at the point when I was about to lose track and despair, there'd be some new shiny narrative trickery (footnotes doing their best to get into a fist fight with the text! comments on the uneasy interface between English and Polish grammar!), or a wonderful way of looking at translations, and that'd give me impetus to read on. Because how can you not enjoy something like this: "Fungi are the epitome of evil, feasting on—rejoicing in—the death of everyone and everything around them [...] Yet they are a necessary evil because fungi consume death. Fungi make the forest possible. Without them, death would obliterate life, leading to far more extinctions"? Or something like this: "what we do is mycelial. What we do as translators is stitch the world into a united and communicating whole"?
So my takeaway from the novel is, a translator is a mushroom. This is odd & wonderful & as a translator, I'm very happy with this discovery. Can't unthink it, won't unthink it.
The novel in a nutshell: a
With footnotes as a form of violence against the narrator by the annotator who attempts to impose their own narrative on top of the text they are given, this is possibly one of the most inventively constructed novels I've read in a while. The Chinese puzzle ball structure of embedded stories clack-clacking uneasily against one another remind me of Nabokov's Pale Fire, possibly the most (in)famous case of an unreliable annotator in literature. If you enjoyed Pale Fire, or, say, Olga Tokarczuk's Dom Dzienny, Dom Nocny (or a bunch of her other novels, but thematically and vibe-wise, DDDN probably comes closest), chances are you will enjoy The Extinction of Irena Rey. Ultimately, I enjoyed it far less than I expected to simply because this particular flavor of chaos and delirium is not my cuppa (I nodded emphatically when one of the characters asked "Need I remind you that sanity has not exactly been the guiding principle since our arrival here?"—I found it a bit too hard to suspend disbelief or find a structure in all this at points), but it might be yours. For me, it was not so much plot-driven or character-driven as driven by the architecture of the text and aphorisms about the nature of translation work. Like, there'd be an agglomeration of too many themes happening at once—borders linguistic and political, violence narrative and historical, and how translation pertains to our understanding of selfhood and otherness, smuggling in strangers and invasive species in familiar guises to crack open the stuffy haunted mansions of closed cultures—or something—(it's not the text, it's my attention span)—and right at the point when I was about to lose track and despair, there'd be some new shiny narrative trickery (footnotes doing their best to get into a fist fight with the text! comments on the uneasy interface between English and Polish grammar!), or a wonderful way of looking at translations, and that'd give me impetus to read on. Because how can you not enjoy something like this: "Fungi are the epitome of evil, feasting on—rejoicing in—the death of everyone and everything around them [...] Yet they are a necessary evil because fungi consume death. Fungi make the forest possible. Without them, death would obliterate life, leading to far more extinctions"? Or something like this: "what we do is mycelial. What we do as translators is stitch the world into a united and communicating whole"?
So my takeaway from the novel is, a translator is a mushroom. This is odd & wonderful & as a translator, I'm very happy with this discovery. Can't unthink it, won't unthink it.
July 7, 2024
I really enjoyed this novel 😃😁😊
🌟 🌟 🥰 🌟 🌟
this isn't a particularly coherent review, but some of you have already written great reviews of this book, that are both very informative and analytical, so I feel kinda excused from the need to do so 😉
a few highlighted things I enjoyed 🙂😁😊
🌟 🌟 😃 🌟 🌟
the novel/story/writing made me laugh alot 😁😆 often in a wry way, and often in a multifaceted kinda way 😉😁
🌟 🌟 😃 🌟 🌟
I loved the layers - who's writing and/or translating who - the story is from the start 'in question'/abit suspect... but such is memory and human experience, I think. interpretation. the balance between understanding and misunderstanding. especially wrt a group of people all operating and conversing (mostly) in a shared second language. I felt it existed as real and surreal at the same time 😁🙂🙃🙂😁
🌟🌲🌳🌲🍄🍄📖📝🍄🍄🌲🌳🌲🌟
I enjoyed the group of translators in its complexity of manifestations - as a family, as a cult, as a kinda single entity... the narrator's 'we' reinforcing the group as a single being speaking. I also enjoyed the forays into a kinda process of individuation - individuals within the group becoming more defined, having specific characteristics, names, personal desires they might pursue... including the individual and group reactions to that... and also with them being subsumed at times, drawn back into the group existence/group body.
I liked the parallels here with nature, ecosystems, fungi/mycelial networks... 🙂
and I liked that it wasn't a linear, one way, process - that it shifted back and fro 🙂
🌟🌲🌳🌲🍄🍄📖📝🍄🍄🌲🌳🌲🌟
and the balance between the collaborative aspect of translation, and whose work a translated text is - not just the authors anymore? tho also the translator and their role are often externally seen lesser, and at times they're almost positioned as a tool, something that enabled the authors words to move from one form to another... and the thoughts about individuality/loss of there 🙂
and I enjoyed the translators initially struggling to function without their author 😉😃😆
🌟🌲🌳🌲🍄🍄📖📝🍄🍄🌲🌳🌲🌟
lots of fun and layered thoughts and feelings about entity, existence, coexistence, symbiosis, (parasitism?)... ++
🌟🌲🌳🌲🍄🍄💀☠🍄🍄🌲🌳🌲🌟
I appreciated the connection of the extinction of forests/endangered ecosystems, and the extinction of languages/endangered languages 🙂
this probably wasn't quite as well developed as other threads within the story, but was solidly there. and a nice strand of the everpresence of extinction - ecologically, their missing author, the possibility of her death, of their deaths... along with the new novel and it's environmental crisis and apocalyptic content.
🌟🌲🌳🌲🍄🍄💀☠🍄🍄🌲🌳🌲🌟
and 'Grey Eminence'!?! that made me chuckle ALOT 😃😉😁😆🤣
🌟
there was lots more I enjoyed, some bits I didn't like so much...
🌟
🎶🎵🌀💫🥱😴💫🌀🎵🎶
I actually listened to the end of the book while very tired, and at times dozing, which seemed very in keeping with the story/content 😉😁 I'm sure there were a few details I missed, but I noticed I didn't feel a pressing desire/need to go back and check them. I might later if I have the opportunity (library copy with a return date), but I came away feeling that my experience was unchanged by having experienced the last bit in a rather dreamy state 😃😁😊😆
🎶🎵🌀💫🥱😴💫🌀🎵🎶
🌟
I don't know if the book technically deserves all the stars, but I enjoyed it so much I'm happy to give them 🙂😃😁😊
🌟 🌟 🌟 🌟 🌟
accessed as a library audiobook, well read by Esther Wane (tho it took me while to take to her narration, and I'm not entirely sure I ever fully did).
I found the novel hard to follow in places as an audiobook, but it was also an enjoyable and easy way to access it, and I think helped with its momentum and observing its kinda madcap progress - for me it was fasure a novel to just kinda let go of/to, and enjoy where it went 🙂😃😁😊
🌟 🌟 🥰 🌟 🌟
this isn't a particularly coherent review, but some of you have already written great reviews of this book, that are both very informative and analytical, so I feel kinda excused from the need to do so 😉
a few highlighted things I enjoyed 🙂😁😊
🌟 🌟 😃 🌟 🌟
the novel/story/writing made me laugh alot 😁😆 often in a wry way, and often in a multifaceted kinda way 😉😁
🌟 🌟 😃 🌟 🌟
I loved the layers - who's writing and/or translating who - the story is from the start 'in question'/abit suspect... but such is memory and human experience, I think. interpretation. the balance between understanding and misunderstanding. especially wrt a group of people all operating and conversing (mostly) in a shared second language. I felt it existed as real and surreal at the same time 😁🙂🙃🙂😁
🌟🌲🌳🌲🍄🍄📖📝🍄🍄🌲🌳🌲🌟
I enjoyed the group of translators in its complexity of manifestations - as a family, as a cult, as a kinda single entity... the narrator's 'we' reinforcing the group as a single being speaking. I also enjoyed the forays into a kinda process of individuation - individuals within the group becoming more defined, having specific characteristics, names, personal desires they might pursue... including the individual and group reactions to that... and also with them being subsumed at times, drawn back into the group existence/group body.
I liked the parallels here with nature, ecosystems, fungi/mycelial networks... 🙂
and I liked that it wasn't a linear, one way, process - that it shifted back and fro 🙂
🌟🌲🌳🌲🍄🍄📖📝🍄🍄🌲🌳🌲🌟
and the balance between the collaborative aspect of translation, and whose work a translated text is - not just the authors anymore? tho also the translator and their role are often externally seen lesser, and at times they're almost positioned as a tool, something that enabled the authors words to move from one form to another... and the thoughts about individuality/loss of there 🙂
and I enjoyed the translators initially struggling to function without their author 😉😃😆
🌟🌲🌳🌲🍄🍄📖📝🍄🍄🌲🌳🌲🌟
lots of fun and layered thoughts and feelings about entity, existence, coexistence, symbiosis, (parasitism?)... ++
🌟🌲🌳🌲🍄🍄💀☠🍄🍄🌲🌳🌲🌟
I appreciated the connection of the extinction of forests/endangered ecosystems, and the extinction of languages/endangered languages 🙂
this probably wasn't quite as well developed as other threads within the story, but was solidly there. and a nice strand of the everpresence of extinction - ecologically, their missing author, the possibility of her death, of their deaths... along with the new novel and it's environmental crisis and apocalyptic content.
🌟🌲🌳🌲🍄🍄💀☠🍄🍄🌲🌳🌲🌟
and 'Grey Eminence'!?! that made me chuckle ALOT 😃😉😁😆🤣
🌟
there was lots more I enjoyed, some bits I didn't like so much...
🌟
🎶🎵🌀💫🥱😴💫🌀🎵🎶
I actually listened to the end of the book while very tired, and at times dozing, which seemed very in keeping with the story/content 😉😁 I'm sure there were a few details I missed, but I noticed I didn't feel a pressing desire/need to go back and check them. I might later if I have the opportunity (library copy with a return date), but I came away feeling that my experience was unchanged by having experienced the last bit in a rather dreamy state 😃😁😊😆
🎶🎵🌀💫🥱😴💫🌀🎵🎶
🌟
I don't know if the book technically deserves all the stars, but I enjoyed it so much I'm happy to give them 🙂😃😁😊
🌟 🌟 🌟 🌟 🌟
accessed as a library audiobook, well read by Esther Wane (tho it took me while to take to her narration, and I'm not entirely sure I ever fully did).
I found the novel hard to follow in places as an audiobook, but it was also an enjoyable and easy way to access it, and I think helped with its momentum and observing its kinda madcap progress - for me it was fasure a novel to just kinda let go of/to, and enjoy where it went 🙂😃😁😊
June 24, 2024
another novel obsessed with its own pseudo brilliance
February 27, 2024
I was so excited to receive an ARC of The Extinction of Irena Ray by Jennifer Croft. Her first novel Homesick was longlisted for the Women's Prize in 2023 and I adored it.
In this book eight translators come to a house in a Polish forest where they are meeting with Irena Ray, a well-known author. As is their custom the translators, who have worked with Irena on many of her previous books, are there to translate Irena's latest masterpiece Gray Eminence. The translators are from eight different countries and all love Irena completely. When she disappears they are unmoored and descend into a weird symbiotic cult like existence. What follows is a fever dream with clues, secrets, relationships, fables from the forest, links to past wars, rivalries and the ongoing quest to uncover what happened to Irena.
The book was meta to the extreme! It's purportedly written by Emi, the Spanish translator, about the time in Poland. She has written the book in Polish and it has been translated by Alexis, the English translator. Alexis has helpfully included footnotes that explain her point of view and these become increasingly snarky. What really happened is mostly up to the reader to decipher.
Who is entitled to tell a story? How much of a role do translators have in shaping an authors story? I love that Jennifer Croft has won awards for translating Olga Tokarczuk and that she is English but can translate both Polish and Spanish works. So many layers!
Obviously the premise was right up my alley so it absolutely pains me beyond belief to say it just didn't work for me. I struggled to connect with the story and battled through the bulk of the chapters for days on end. It was convoluted and nonsensical at times. The ending while confusing and abstract did pull the threads together a little for me but overall this was not a book I understood at all. I am so sad to write this as I really wanted to fall in love with it.
I've already seen several glowing reviews of The Extinction of Irena Ray so I'm hoping this is an it's me not you situation.
Thanks to @scribepub for my #gifted copy.
In this book eight translators come to a house in a Polish forest where they are meeting with Irena Ray, a well-known author. As is their custom the translators, who have worked with Irena on many of her previous books, are there to translate Irena's latest masterpiece Gray Eminence. The translators are from eight different countries and all love Irena completely. When she disappears they are unmoored and descend into a weird symbiotic cult like existence. What follows is a fever dream with clues, secrets, relationships, fables from the forest, links to past wars, rivalries and the ongoing quest to uncover what happened to Irena.
The book was meta to the extreme! It's purportedly written by Emi, the Spanish translator, about the time in Poland. She has written the book in Polish and it has been translated by Alexis, the English translator. Alexis has helpfully included footnotes that explain her point of view and these become increasingly snarky. What really happened is mostly up to the reader to decipher.
Who is entitled to tell a story? How much of a role do translators have in shaping an authors story? I love that Jennifer Croft has won awards for translating Olga Tokarczuk and that she is English but can translate both Polish and Spanish works. So many layers!
Obviously the premise was right up my alley so it absolutely pains me beyond belief to say it just didn't work for me. I struggled to connect with the story and battled through the bulk of the chapters for days on end. It was convoluted and nonsensical at times. The ending while confusing and abstract did pull the threads together a little for me but overall this was not a book I understood at all. I am so sad to write this as I really wanted to fall in love with it.
I've already seen several glowing reviews of The Extinction of Irena Ray so I'm hoping this is an it's me not you situation.
Thanks to @scribepub for my #gifted copy.
March 10, 2024
This book feels like way too much work to read.
It reminds me of the book S., on which I had to take pages of notes in order to follow the story, but that book was worth the effort. I’m not convinced that this one is.
It reminds me of the book S., on which I had to take pages of notes in order to follow the story, but that book was worth the effort. I’m not convinced that this one is.
January 9, 2025
What a creative comedy, I don't know why it's gotten such a low GR rating. I love unreliable narrators and characters, and Croft has given us a trio of them: the author/narrator of this book; the translator of this book (both of whom are also characters in this book); and Irena Rey, the famous author they both translate and venerate. The other main characters are also Irena Rey translators, a wacky but self-serious group who grow increasingly unhinged the longer Rey is missing. In addition to these tricksy entertainments, Croft adds all kinds of creative riffs on the nature and philosophy of translation; putting them in the mouths of this kooky crew removes the seriousness without sacrificing the meaning. A book only a translator could write!
March 6, 2024
Melodramatic magical realism aimed at translation nerds. There’s flowery language and pompous pretentiousness dripping off every page.
Will win all the prizes.
Will win all the prizes.
March 29, 2024
Eight translators walk into a novel and lose their author. It lost me as a reader too. It could have been so much better. A metafictional magical realism romp, written by a lauded translator in the first person of a Spanish translator who is in turn translated by her nemesis into English, with her own footnotes and comments, in true metafictional headache-style.
It starts off well enough, then it gets both literarily and literally lost in the forest at the halfway mark, then partially gets back on track at the end. I appreciated the revelations about translators and how they work. But the vapid characters and their banal exploits, were just not engaging.
The dominance of English is hinted at. But there were only Western translators. What happened to the Asian, Middle Eastern or African translators?
About translators:
As translators, we were accustomed to muting our own voices.
A TRANSLATION IS a new experience of something that is essentially, fundamentally the same. Twice in one week we had run home from the forest: once with her, and now once without her. It was the ultimate example of loss in translation, a catastrophic dereliction we couldn’t yet begin to comprehend.
I consider it my duty to provide this service to the cultural ecosystem. Translation is a kind of recycling.
She thought translating was also editing; what this ultimately meant was that she trusted her own judgments more than she trusted Irena.
But I'm fascinated by the quote from french poet Francis Ponge.
“There can be no escape of the tree by way of the tree.”
It starts off well enough, then it gets both literarily and literally lost in the forest at the halfway mark, then partially gets back on track at the end. I appreciated the revelations about translators and how they work. But the vapid characters and their banal exploits, were just not engaging.
The dominance of English is hinted at. But there were only Western translators. What happened to the Asian, Middle Eastern or African translators?
About translators:
As translators, we were accustomed to muting our own voices.
A TRANSLATION IS a new experience of something that is essentially, fundamentally the same. Twice in one week we had run home from the forest: once with her, and now once without her. It was the ultimate example of loss in translation, a catastrophic dereliction we couldn’t yet begin to comprehend.
I consider it my duty to provide this service to the cultural ecosystem. Translation is a kind of recycling.
She thought translating was also editing; what this ultimately meant was that she trusted her own judgments more than she trusted Irena.
But I'm fascinated by the quote from french poet Francis Ponge.
“There can be no escape of the tree by way of the tree.”
Read
March 8, 2024This book was strange, funny, thoughtful, and while I certainly got lost in the forest, I found my way out and now find myself wanting to read this all over again.
We open with eight translators, each from a different country, arriving at the house of a famous author who resides in an ancient Polish forest. Soon after, our famous author, Irena, mysteriously disappears. The eight are desperate to find their beloved author and begin to investigate as they continue translating her writing. Fantastic premise, but this is NOT the mystery it may appear to be. Rather, this is a character exploration of people in close proximity with a similar obsession. This is a fever dream of paranoia and isolation, of creation and destruction. Most of all, this is a love letter to the act of translation itself.
I wasn't sure about this book all the way through, and I'm still not sure if I LIKED it. But I am absolutely in awe of it. And I want to go back and read it all the way through again with a new found respect for what the author is doing. So actually I do think I liked this; I think I liked it very much.
We open with eight translators, each from a different country, arriving at the house of a famous author who resides in an ancient Polish forest. Soon after, our famous author, Irena, mysteriously disappears. The eight are desperate to find their beloved author and begin to investigate as they continue translating her writing. Fantastic premise, but this is NOT the mystery it may appear to be. Rather, this is a character exploration of people in close proximity with a similar obsession. This is a fever dream of paranoia and isolation, of creation and destruction. Most of all, this is a love letter to the act of translation itself.
I wasn't sure about this book all the way through, and I'm still not sure if I LIKED it. But I am absolutely in awe of it. And I want to go back and read it all the way through again with a new found respect for what the author is doing. So actually I do think I liked this; I think I liked it very much.
March 3, 2024
This book seemed like it was written by AI. Messy and droning on in the weirdest places. And yet, I couldn’t stop reading it. I was drawn into finding out what happened to Irena and what would happen to the translators. The ending was not really satisfying, so if you can live with that go ahead and give this a try.
April 12, 2024
I could barely get through this. I just could not care any less about any of the characters. It was, so far, the worst book I have read in years. It took everything in my power to even finish it.
August 26, 2024
La premissa: els 8 traductors (English, Spanish, French, Eslovenian, German, Serbian, Ukranian, Swedish) d'Irena Rey, autora polonesa i futura Premi Nobel el 2027, es troben a casa de l'Autora al bell mig del bosc Białowieża, a la frontera entre Polònia i Bielorússia, per traduir la seva última novel·la. El segon dia Irena Rey desapareix i ells es queden allà, traduint l'obra mentre busquen pistes per poder-la trobar.
És una novel·la estranyíssima, autoreferencial (la novel·la que llegim se'ns diu que ha estat escrita per la traductora al castellà, en polonès, però que està traduïda a l'anglès. Per tant, tenim notes de la traductora anglesa que, a la vegada, és un dels personatges del llibre.), i molt divertida. Podria caure en un absurd massa absurd, però sempre hi ha un fil que ens lliga a la realitat i els personatges tenen tots una certa consciència.
També és un llibre que podria forçar massa el simbolisme pel que fa el tema de la traducció, i tampoc ho fa. És a dir, tot podria tenir un doble sentit però, per sort, no el té. Però sí que et fa reflexionar sobre la traducció, el paper dels traductors, la relació autor/traductor, i tots els etcs.
És interessant saber que Jennifer Croft és la traductora d'Olga Tokarczuk (a l'anglès).
Em va costar entrar-hi. A les 100 pàgines pensava: podria seguir o podria deixar-lo. Me n'alegro de no haver-lo deixat però tampoc sé molt bé per què. Està b��, crec que hi pensaré sovint, per bé o per malament.
Podria dir més coses, però crec que amb això ja està.
És una novel·la estranyíssima, autoreferencial (la novel·la que llegim se'ns diu que ha estat escrita per la traductora al castellà, en polonès, però que està traduïda a l'anglès. Per tant, tenim notes de la traductora anglesa que, a la vegada, és un dels personatges del llibre.), i molt divertida. Podria caure en un absurd massa absurd, però sempre hi ha un fil que ens lliga a la realitat i els personatges tenen tots una certa consciència.
També és un llibre que podria forçar massa el simbolisme pel que fa el tema de la traducció, i tampoc ho fa. És a dir, tot podria tenir un doble sentit però, per sort, no el té. Però sí que et fa reflexionar sobre la traducció, el paper dels traductors, la relació autor/traductor, i tots els etcs.
És interessant saber que Jennifer Croft és la traductora d'Olga Tokarczuk (a l'anglès).
Em va costar entrar-hi. A les 100 pàgines pensava: podria seguir o podria deixar-lo. Me n'alegro de no haver-lo deixat però tampoc sé molt bé per què. Està b��, crec que hi pensaré sovint, per bé o per malament.
Podria dir més coses, però crec que amb això ja està.
Shelved as 'abandoned'
January 31, 2025Life is too short. I’m bored and out.
January 19, 2024
"The Extinction of Irena Rey" by Jennifer Croft is a meta book in the best way possible - this spellbinding story explores the art and mystery of translating while creating a locked room murder mystery. It's not always an easy read, but the best and most interesting stories are work aren't they?
In Extinction, our narrator for the most part is the original Translator (called "Spanish" but her name is Emi) - she provides comic relief, sharp insight and extra detail. At the start of the novel the main translator and the translators from other countries have come together in Warsaw to Irena Ray's home to read and translate her work, her magnum opus. It is expected that this work will win the Nobel and they are all incredibly excited. Irena takes them to the forest and they gladly follow as they revere her. But they quickly confused when she disappears. There is plenty of comic relief as Serbian, Sweden, English, French, German, Slovenian, Spanish and Ukrainian argue about what to do. Because of course that's how Emi would relay them, only by their translating language.
What happens next is a true work of art ! The account continues as Emi (Spanish), details their investigation. As time passes, the translators are quite surprised of Irena Rey's secrets. In addition there is a mysterious poster https://jenniferlcroft.com/amadou-2#/... that Jennifer Croft has included on her own webpage.
Emil and Alexis(English) bicker in the footnotes As they delve deeper into the forest and Irena's mysterious past, they uncover secrets and deceptions that challenge their reverence for the author and the plot thickens as October, The Nobel Announcement time comes closer.
Since I started reviewing books I have taken the time to read about the authors - whether they include it in the book or if other have reported upon them. Jennifer Croft is a pretty famous translator : https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/11/bo.... and has translated for a Nobel Prize winner herself!
Croft knows what she is talking about and she has done it in unique and irrepressibly charming way!
#bloomsbury #jennifercroft #theextinctionofirenadelrey
In Extinction, our narrator for the most part is the original Translator (called "Spanish" but her name is Emi) - she provides comic relief, sharp insight and extra detail. At the start of the novel the main translator and the translators from other countries have come together in Warsaw to Irena Ray's home to read and translate her work, her magnum opus. It is expected that this work will win the Nobel and they are all incredibly excited. Irena takes them to the forest and they gladly follow as they revere her. But they quickly confused when she disappears. There is plenty of comic relief as Serbian, Sweden, English, French, German, Slovenian, Spanish and Ukrainian argue about what to do. Because of course that's how Emi would relay them, only by their translating language.
What happens next is a true work of art ! The account continues as Emi (Spanish), details their investigation. As time passes, the translators are quite surprised of Irena Rey's secrets. In addition there is a mysterious poster https://jenniferlcroft.com/amadou-2#/... that Jennifer Croft has included on her own webpage.
Emil and Alexis(English) bicker in the footnotes As they delve deeper into the forest and Irena's mysterious past, they uncover secrets and deceptions that challenge their reverence for the author and the plot thickens as October, The Nobel Announcement time comes closer.
Since I started reviewing books I have taken the time to read about the authors - whether they include it in the book or if other have reported upon them. Jennifer Croft is a pretty famous translator : https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/11/bo.... and has translated for a Nobel Prize winner herself!
Croft knows what she is talking about and she has done it in unique and irrepressibly charming way!
#bloomsbury #jennifercroft #theextinctionofirenadelrey
April 29, 2024
Conversations on the art of translation, an author missing, metanarrative, images and footnotes? I should be all over this…
I stopped at the 74% mark or, to be more specific, at the long-winded sock/heart simile in which, like with the rest of what I’ve read, I couldn’t find any humour. Too many narrative strands, ideas on climate change, extinction, and fungi blending into one mind-boggling blob… I might come back to this, but I don’t care about any of it.
I stopped at the 74% mark or, to be more specific, at the long-winded sock/heart simile in which, like with the rest of what I’ve read, I couldn’t find any humour. Too many narrative strands, ideas on climate change, extinction, and fungi blending into one mind-boggling blob… I might come back to this, but I don’t care about any of it.
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