I'm not quite sure what I read just now, but it was fun and weird and absolutely entertaining!
It's one of those book, where I can't explain exactly why I did like it. The story is at times confusing, often funny, the characters are very unique and all in all I found "The Extinction of Irena Rey" highly entertaining. Even though, maybe I did not completely get it :D

What a strange and absurd book (compliment).

We meet a group of translators to an isolated house in Poland on the edge of the woods. They are there to translate the works of famous and enigmatic author Irena Rey, as they have done a few times before. When Rey inexplicably vanishes, the translators try to work out what’s happened and whether they should continue with their work.

The Extinction of Irena Rey is very meta - its a book within a book, translated by one of the translators in the story (who comments on the story within it). A lot of fun in the group dynamics (equal parts horny and petty). There are a lot of threads and lore within the book which could be hard to keep track of at times, but overall I found this an enjoyable read.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for the eARC.

‘The Extinction of Irena Rey’ is Jennifer Croft's second novel, following her success as a well known translator. We follow a group of translators who meet at the house of their enigmatic ‘Author’ to translate her latest novel. Very soon things start to take a weird turn, culminating into the apparent disappearance of the ‘Author’.

Possibly my favorite aspect of this book was the narrative style. It takes a unique approach, presenting the story as a non-fictional account from the perspective of one of the translators within the novel. Not only that but the version of this account that we as readers are privy to is translated by another translator, who adds footnotes throughout.

I enjoyed this one enough to see it through to the end as the slight weirdness and the unnerving and confusing mystery surrounding the 'Author' kept me intrigued.

The premise of this one sounded so good, but the execution fell a little flat for me personally. Despite being a fairly short book, the pacing felt a little too slow and drawn out for my liking, which hugely impacted on my enjoyment and motivation to pick this one up.

If you enjoy slow literary mysteries, books exploring translation and fiction written as if it’s non-fiction, then I’d recommend you give this one a go!

Thanks to NetGalley and Scribe UK for the e-arc. All opinions are my own.

The Extinction of Irena Rey
by Jennifer Croft


I have so much admiration for the particular writing skills required to translate other writers' work into different language, the effort to translate cultural codes and language shortcuts into a coherent narrative without losing the nuances intended by the original author. In a way the translator has two masters instead of one, audience and author. When a translator writes for herself I am always interested and this is Croft's second book, the first of which, "Homesick" was longlisted for the Women's Prize in 2023, so she's doing something well, maybe she's doing everything well.

In this truly bizarre, but surprisingly compelling story, Croft has created a (potentially murder) mystery set in an eerie forest on the border between Poland and Belarus, involving a renowned Polish author and her team of translators.

She uses her own lived experience as the English translator for Olga Tokarczuk in this smart, comic, surreal romp which gives fantastic insights into the business of literary translation. Couple that with the cast of zany characters who may or may not represent real people ( I truly hope some of them do) and what shines through best in this batshit crazy tale is the level of intimacy required to work on a team such as this. Egos are at stake, diplomacy must fit like a glove. Interpretation is everything.

This is quite a difficult book to get into. It took me at least 30% to settle down. It drags a little in the middle and the ending is possibly a bit rushed, but for all it's pacing peculiarities, it becomes utterly unputdownable.

This is not a book I would merrily press onto every reader, but if you read in translation, if language and it's structure interests you, if you don't mind not knowing what's going on for a large portion of the time, think "The Library at Mount Char", then you will probably get a kick out of this. I loved it.

I think.


Publication date: 14th March 2024
Thanks to #NetGalley and #ScribeUK for the eGalley

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.

My thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for my free digital ARC of The Extinction of Irena Rey! After publishing Homesickness last year, which I loved, renowned Polish & Spanish translator Jennifer Croft has ventured once again into the realm of original fiction, though this one ties closely to her translation work. It features a group of translators from Polish who gather at the home of their ‘Author’ to translate her latest novel. Except when they arrive at their usual summit, the Author is behaving erratically, and eventually goes missing.
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I got strong Olga Tokarczuk vibes from this one, but whether that’s just through my own biases since I’ve read Croft’s English translations of Tokarczuk, I couldn’t say. This feeling is closely linked to the themes of this novel - the relationship between writer and translator, this strange key to wider audiences, both one-sided and not, as translators are trusted to bring the author’s words to languages they cannot comprehend. As a former student of translation, this relationship never fails to fascinate.
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The structure of the book is also fun, as it’s ostensibly a fictional book written by one of the translators about their situation with the author, translated (and edited?) with footnotes by another of the translators. I really enjoyed the tension that’s visible between the author of the novel (the Spanish translator), and the English translator translating it - all played out via the footnotes. Their rivalry isn’t the only lightness to a novel that’s a literary mystery. I thought the whole thing had a sort of frivolity to it.
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Despite my interest in translation, what should have been an engaging mystery, and plenty of humour though, I often found myself disengaged from it. It’s not a long book but it felt sluggish. It took me a full week to read 288 pages, the pacing was just off. The translators who didn’t have a major role to play were also somewhat two-dimensional - though this could have been intentional as Emi (the author of this novel, the Spanish translator - confused yet?) might not have viewed them as tantamount to the story.
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If you’re a fan of meta vibes in your fiction, I’d definitely recommend this odd little novel filled with fungi and forests, musings on translations, and authors behaving badly. It slightly missed the mark for me, but still I enjoyed lots of aspects!

I love Croft's work in translation and I loved her previous book 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.

Some novels are exhilarating and joyful reading moments. Jennifer Croft's "The Extinction of Irena Rey" is one of those novels. After her beautiful and elegiac hybrid work of memoir and fiction, "Homesick," Croft turns to the story of a group of translators who deal with the disappearance of their Polish author, Irena Rey. Once Rey disappears, the translators become unmoored, and they search for any meaning to their relationship to Rey and her written work. They also question what it means to translate, and how translation and literature connect to the natural world.

Croft's novel is told through Emi's viewpoint while her rival, Alexis translates the novel into the English language. Throughout the novel, Alexis will gives us translator notes about decisions she made about Emi's manuscript. While Alexis and Emi can be seen as doppelgängers of each other and of Croft, we also have the other translators, we learn why they have chosen to work for Rey. If it were up to me, I would like to see a prequel or sequel to any of these characters as Croft draws them so expertly.

I found this book incredibly witty especially as Croft gives us moments of amusing metafiction. At one point, Emi writes, "A strange book called Snakes and Ladders written for reason in Argentine Spanish by the U.S. translator of Olga Tokarczuk." Snakes and Ladders was the name of "Homesick" before it was released as a memoir in the U.S. and a novella in the U.K. We also have Emi's text and then Alexis's translator notes disputing Emi's version of events. Alexis's translator retorts slowed down my reading as I was constantly going back to them.

I don't want to spoil what happens in the novel, but Croft lands the plane as the saying goes. I was worried that the ending would not match the strength of the rest of the novel, but Croft ends the novel in a way that honours the story and her readers. I did not want the novel to end; I wanted it to be one of those chunkster books that have become so prevalent these days. There is something so comforting about being in the hands of an assured and gifted writer. This is the second year in a row (Homesick came out last year) that I have read a first-rate book from Jennifer Croft.

'The Extinction of Irena Rey' is a strange, challenging novel that I'm sure will make some of the literary prize shortlists. It has a very surreal, other-worldly feel to it although there is nothing explicitly supernatural that happens. It boasts both a potentially unreliable narrator and a potentially unreliable translator (both fictional) which was a first at least for me.

The story is set in the Bialowska forest on the Poland-Belarus border, one of the last wilderness regions in Europe. A group of translators arrive at the home of Irena Rey, a very famous author tipped for the Nobel prize, to translate her latest novel. The translators are forbidden from translating anyone else writing in Polish, and work together with the author on the translation, sequestered away in the forest. They have an almost cultish devotion to 'their' author. But this time they arrange to find her husband missing and Rey herself behaving oddly, before she too disappears. The translators are left rudderless and unsure of how to respond, and soon descend into all sorts of odd behaviour.

The narrator is one of the translators who features in the story, but the supposed translator of her account is another character in the book, and one that the narrator strongly dislikes. This creates an interesting dynamic throughout the account and makes it doubly hard to decide what, if anything, is true. It's a clever idea and definitely gave another dimension to the story.

I can't honestly say I always fully understood what was going on, or know if I was meant to. Some books are just like that - and I personally don't find that very satisfying. It's certainly clever, and it's readable enough, but it does require more effort and concentration than the average novel and there wasn't for me enough pay-off for the effort I put in. I didn't really warm to any of the characters and the plot wasn't strong enough (or clear enough) for that not to matter.

If you enjoy clever, original books, and/or surrealism and magical realism, you may well enjoy this. It isn't a good choice for a lighter, more casual read. It reminded me somewhat of the works of Helen Oyeyemi in terms of style, although I prefer the latter author. Her novels would be a good a choice for someone who enjoys this one ('Peaces' is my personal favourite of hers).

Jennifer Croft is known for a number of things, all of them relevant to this idiosyncratic novel

As the English translator of Olga Tokarczuk - an author known for the community spirit she engenders amongst her many translators. The two jointly won the 2018 International Booker Prize for Croft’s translation of Tokarczuk’s polymath constellation-novel “Flights”; later Croft also translated what the Nobel Committee called their 2018-Laureate Tokarczuk’s “magnum opus” “The Book of Jacob”.

For not being the translator of Tokarczuk’s astrology-infused, remote Polish forest set, mystery-noir “Drive Your Plow Over The Bones of The Dead” – in my view one of the most overrated books of the 21st Century.

For her admirable campaign to have translators names on the cover of books – a principled stance which has meant she will not be translating Tokarczuk’s next series of novels – as the publisher which owns the translation rights – as well as it seems the Nobel Prize (Fitzcarraldo) are as stubborn as their monochrome covers are scuffed.

As author of the 2023 Women’s Prize shortlisted “Homesick” – a hybrid form book which in the UK formed the first of the “untranslated” series by Charco Press (who have never had a problem giving translators equal billing to writers) and was published as a novel, but which began life as a Spanish language novel, was published (and one prizes) in the US as a lightly fictionalised and illustrated memoir, and had its own illustrated website.

So - community of translators, polymath writing, Noble Prize, remote Polish forest set mystery noir, hybrid form novel blurring memoir/autofiction, illustrations – all mixed together her into Croft’s second UK and debut US novel.

And the other element I would add is that this is one of the many, many novels inspired by Merlin Sheldrake’s “Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape our Futures” (although other books have used that source material so much more convincingly).

The novel revolves around the eponymous Polish author, who in 2017 (and shortly before the annual Noble Prize announcement) hosts – at her remote house on the edge of the IRL Białowieża Forest - a get together of eight of her translators to present her “masterpiece” “Szara Eminencja” (translated “Grey Eminence” in English – which is I think a deliberately bad literal translation as most if not all English readers would use the French equivalent …. I must admit I have never even previously heard it as an English expression).

The translators know each other well from past gatherings and tend to call themselves by their languages (English, French, German, French, Serbian, Slovenian, Spanish, Ukrainian); they are slightly thrown to be joined by a new member – Swedish – who does not have their shared history of traditions and unquestioning reverence for the author and her works; he replaces another member – Czech who has died recently.

Almost immediately the author starts acting oddly before disappearing altogether – leaving the translators to conduct what appears to be a rather lacklustre and oddly motivated search for her (at least while they are not all sleeping together) while around them various other odd things take place, with copious references to Funghi and Central European legend and recent history, and a backdrop of the destruction of the primeval forest.

The story itself we are reading is an autofictional novelisation of the events written by one of the translators (Spanish – Emilia) and translated for us by another translator (English – Alexis). Emilia and Alexis have a rivalry both professional (Emilia favours absolute fidelity in translation, Alexis improvements to the original) and personal (particularly over a lover that Emilia takes from among one of the other translators). And in one of the book’s highlights, Alexis’s translations is accompanied by copious footnotes which are more heckles about Emilia’s memory or writing.

The book is littered with copious references/metaphors/similes around translation (probably the strongest point of the book ) and scattered with pictures relevant to the deliberately preposterous plot and the various Instagram accounts which feature in it (a number of these are then included on Croft’s own website in her dedication to meta-fiction).

It feels from all of this like this could be a really impressive novel – but I have to say the plot rather put me off and I completely failed to engage.

The Extinction of Irena Rey is an extremely meta-novel. The author Jennifer Croft is a translator and is best known for her translations of Polish author Olga Tokarczuk who won the Nobel Prize for literature. The book that Croft has written is about a group of translators (known initially by their languages) who go to translate the new book of Polish author Irena Rey. Both Croft and Tokarczuk get name checked in the novel. But it then gets more meta still. The book is ostensibly written in Polish by Emi, the Argentinian who translates into Spanish and then translated into English by Alex, the American translator. One this that is clear about the narrative is that Emi hates Alex but Alex uses who translators notes to fight back.
The Extinction of Irena Rey itself is a kind of academic satire/farce. The eight translators worship their author Irena and have come to her house on the edge of a forest on the Polish/Belarussian border. But after a weird night in the forest, Irena disappears. Despite this the group stay on, becoming stranger and more unhinged as they continue their task, while trying to find clues as to where Irena has gone, develop relationships and time goes on. As they do, various new characters come in and out of their lives, creating further chaos.
There is plenty to enjoy in The Extinction of Irena Rey, not the least of which a glimpse into the world of the translator, a role in which a the person needs to render themselves invisible in some respects. But the whole construction just becomes tiring after a while. Even just trying to keep abreast of the different attitudes of Emi and Alex takes a bit of mental load. But it is just the accretion of events. The endless wandering of the characters into town, into the forest, into each other’s bedrooms. The lengthy conversations, the weird theories that these seemingly very intelligent people come up with to try and get Irena back or work out her location.
The Extinction of Irena Rey is an antic cerebral novel. An academic farce that explores the world of translated literature. It has a promising beginning but loses steam about two thirds of the way through when the mystery is still not solved. But it increasingly becomes more and more difficult to justify why as a reader you might want to spend more time with these people.

“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 2018 (awarded in 2019) Nobel Lauraete Olga Tokarczuk.

I say that not to detract from Croft's 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 was pictured there 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</a> 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 points about translation, as she explained 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.”

Jennifer Croft is one of the best translators writing today and The Extinction of Irena Rey re-affirms her out as one of the most promising prose writers of her generation.