Jennifer Croft begins her first novel, The Extinction of Irena Rey, with a translator’s note. This might be read as a subtle in-joke: Croft is among our finest translators, acclaimed for, among other works, her renderings of Polish Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s work into English.
Yet this translator’s note comes not from Croft per se but rather from her character Alexis. Labeled a “warning,” it begins, “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.”
Alexis acknowledges that she is a character in the novel, which, she tells us, is partly based on true events and written by another translator, Emi. “Translation isn’t reading,” Alexis writes. “Translation is being forced to write a book again. The Extinction of Irena Rey required me to re-create myself as the worst person in the narrator’s world, the monster who seems to want to ruin everything.”
This is the first of many clues that The Extinction of Irena Rey is going to be a wild ride. And it delivers, spectacularly. Croft has written a bizarre book, simultaneously unsettling and ludicrous.
The novel opens with Emi, Alexis, and six other translators arriving at the home of Irena Rey, a highly regarded Polish novelist. Rey lives in the Białowieża Forest, near the Belarusian border; she is mysterious and reclusive and has won the undying loyalty of these translators, who have worked with her six times before.
The translators care little for their colleagues, initially referring to one another not by name but by the languages each represents. What they do have in common is Rey. “We did love her,” Emi tells us. “We wanted to make her eternal. We had been sworn to shuttle her sideways, into our other languages, new worlds where she’d be increasingly sought after, talked about. Protected. Desired.”
Rey has summoned the translators to translate her latest novel, Grey Eminence, which many speculate will be her magnum opus. She leads them to a strict reserve in the primeval forest, where she displays the severed hoof of an animal, then gives them pouches containing “lumps of a hard substance the color of sawdust”; the group departs after the Swedish translator is bitten by a snake.
Back at home, Rey gives the group a lecture about the wildlife of the Białowieża Forest, which is under threat from logging. Obliquely, she suggests the information is relevant to Grey Eminence. The group shares a dinner, and the next morning, the translators receive an email from Rey. A copy of the novel is attached, but the accompanying text cautions, “Do not open.”
Then Rey disappears.
Unable to find her, the translators panic. They return to the forest, where they’re turned away by a ranger. “Twice in one week,” Emi reflects, “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.”
Eventually, the group decides to begin doing the work that Rey has asked them not to do: translating Grey Eminence into their respective languages. The manuscript turns out to follow an influential “climate change artist.” As the translators fight, flirt, and await the author’s return, they learn more about one another—including their names. Their joy is palpable when one of them receives an email, ostensibly from Rey, and also after she appears to update her Instagram. Grey Eminence, meanwhile, ends with a genuine surprise that answers some questions while raising others.
The Extinction of Irena Rey is a dizzying novel, one that benefits from its unusual structure. The relationship between Alexis and Emi is crucial, but it also becomes one of the book’s funniest running jokes because Emi hates Alexis with a passion and takes several shots at her throughout the book. Alexis responds in footnotes, dismissing many of Emi’s claims as fictions; her dry denials are uniformly hilarious. After Emi writes, “Alexis was kneeling in front of the chests, holding up three large brass keys and grinning like she was at an Arkansas beauty pageant,” for instance, Alexis responds: “Fuck you, Emilia Martini.”
The structure also allows Croft to present both a potentially unreliable narrator and a possibly unreliable translator, a twist that increases the mystery inherent in the book. She has considerable fun with the suspense, offering clues and red herrings, as well as a series of possibly connected events, including the near murder of one translator by a bearded archer. It’s to Croft’s credit that, because of the novel’s setup, these incidents seem completely reasonable.
The character of Irena is memorable; even though she’s absent for most of the novel, her presence lingers like a stain. Croft conveys the translators’ possibly misguided, fawning admiration—“She was the literary version of an apex predator, a preternaturally gifted grizzly bear, a crocodile genius”—while subtly suggesting that Rey, with her ego and her penchant for overwrought pronouncements, is not, perhaps, all she’s cracked up to be. (Croft also gently mocks the translators, whom she depicts, semi-affectionately, as a gang that can’t shoot straight or even find the gun at all.)
Croft’s sense of humor and her finely drawn characters combine with her gift for depicting the beautiful but forbidding Białowieża Forest to make The Extinction of Irena Rey a grand entertainment. This is a serious novel, but at the same time, one that doesn’t take itself too seriously.•
