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A review by chrisbiss
The Extinction of Irena Rey by Jennifer Croft
3.5
Jennifer Croft's name is one I've seen a lot in the past few months as I've been trying to read more translated fiction, particularly in relation to her work translating Olga Tokarczuk’s *Flights* and *The Books of Jacob* into English. I haven't actually read any of her translations yet, but when someone recommended *The Extinction of Irena Rey* and I saw what it was about I knew I had to read it.
Even had I not known of Croft beforehand, this is exactly the sort of thing I'm drawn to. A group of translators gather in a cabin in a remote Polish forest to begin translating the latest work by a Polish Nobel laureate. While they're there the author disappears, and in their attempts to figure out what's happened and where she's gone, weird things start to happen. The events are narrated to us in the form of a novel written by the Spanish translator, writing in Polish, which is then translated for us by the English translator, who is herself a character in the novel. She has added 'corrections' and her own commentary on the events of the novel in the form of footnotes, which are often scathing about the original author of the text, who in turn seems to despise the English translator.
What follows is a slippery, hard-to-define novel. It's concerned with climate change, and human impacts on the environment, and extinction, and the unbalancing of nature thanks to capitalism and the effects of people. Everything we create, it says, necessarily comes at the expense of something else - even art. The artist is rendered as a vampire who sucks truth and beauty out of the world and cannibalises it for her own purposes - just as destructive as loggers, or people drilling for oil, but in her own way.
Translation here is also rendered as an act of violence against ideas and language and culture itself. At one point Croft quotes Robert Frost describing translation as "flawed and flaying". Translation, and translators, create art in their own right, but they do it by using up the raw material of the original creation - which itself has been created by the original author's cannibalism of the world around her.
Interestingly, given that Croft is one of Olga Tokarczuk's translators, some elements of the plot here aren't entirely dissimilar to that of *Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead* - not a book that Croft translated but one that I imagine she's familiar with. I haven't read much (any?) other Polish fiction translated into English, but I'm curious to know whether more of this novel is recycled and reimagined from Polish source material. That would be an interesting parallel with one of the major revelations about Irena Rey, the titular fictional author whose absence is central to this work, and it would add a very satisfying level of metatextuality to what is already a very complex and layered work.
At its best, *The Extinction of Irena Rey* is a really intricate mystery that gives us not one but two potentially unreliable narrators - maybe even three, if you consider its approach to translation and language and how it renders the very words on the page as unreliable by nature. There are moments where it falters, especially in the middle sections where the pace drops off and it often feels like the book is meandering through the forest without any destination in sight. When we do get to the climax it feels a little rushed and disjointed, and I struggled to tell whether that was intentional - we're told by the English translator several times that the original author is not a competent writer and that she's done her best to elevate the work in its translation - or whether it's simply Croft's own writing letting the side down. My instinct is that, since it's impossible to tell whether those rough moments are actually intentional, it's the latter and the novel simply stumbles occasionally.
Still, I enjoyed this a lot. My goal this year is to read more fiction in translation and, while this isn't *actually* a translated work, I enjoyed how much it tied in to that current interest of mine. There are a lot of very interesting discussions about the nature and purpose of translation layered in among the more immediate plot, and I think I'm going to carry them with me into the translated work that I read this year. I'm glad I picked this up.
Even had I not known of Croft beforehand, this is exactly the sort of thing I'm drawn to. A group of translators gather in a cabin in a remote Polish forest to begin translating the latest work by a Polish Nobel laureate. While they're there the author disappears, and in their attempts to figure out what's happened and where she's gone, weird things start to happen. The events are narrated to us in the form of a novel written by the Spanish translator, writing in Polish, which is then translated for us by the English translator, who is herself a character in the novel. She has added 'corrections' and her own commentary on the events of the novel in the form of footnotes, which are often scathing about the original author of the text, who in turn seems to despise the English translator.
What follows is a slippery, hard-to-define novel. It's concerned with climate change, and human impacts on the environment, and extinction, and the unbalancing of nature thanks to capitalism and the effects of people. Everything we create, it says, necessarily comes at the expense of something else - even art. The artist is rendered as a vampire who sucks truth and beauty out of the world and cannibalises it for her own purposes - just as destructive as loggers, or people drilling for oil, but in her own way.
Translation here is also rendered as an act of violence against ideas and language and culture itself. At one point Croft quotes Robert Frost describing translation as "flawed and flaying". Translation, and translators, create art in their own right, but they do it by using up the raw material of the original creation - which itself has been created by the original author's cannibalism of the world around her.
Interestingly, given that Croft is one of Olga Tokarczuk's translators, some elements of the plot here aren't entirely dissimilar to that of *Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead* - not a book that Croft translated but one that I imagine she's familiar with. I haven't read much (any?) other Polish fiction translated into English, but I'm curious to know whether more of this novel is recycled and reimagined from Polish source material. That would be an interesting parallel with one of the major revelations about Irena Rey, the titular fictional author whose absence is central to this work, and it would add a very satisfying level of metatextuality to what is already a very complex and layered work.
At its best, *The Extinction of Irena Rey* is a really intricate mystery that gives us not one but two potentially unreliable narrators - maybe even three, if you consider its approach to translation and language and how it renders the very words on the page as unreliable by nature. There are moments where it falters, especially in the middle sections where the pace drops off and it often feels like the book is meandering through the forest without any destination in sight. When we do get to the climax it feels a little rushed and disjointed, and I struggled to tell whether that was intentional - we're told by the English translator several times that the original author is not a competent writer and that she's done her best to elevate the work in its translation - or whether it's simply Croft's own writing letting the side down. My instinct is that, since it's impossible to tell whether those rough moments are actually intentional, it's the latter and the novel simply stumbles occasionally.
Still, I enjoyed this a lot. My goal this year is to read more fiction in translation and, while this isn't *actually* a translated work, I enjoyed how much it tied in to that current interest of mine. There are a lot of very interesting discussions about the nature and purpose of translation layered in among the more immediate plot, and I think I'm going to carry them with me into the translated work that I read this year. I'm glad I picked this up.