Eight translators travel to Poland to translate Irena Rey’s next novel. Hijinks ensue.
The Extinction of Irena Rey is a novel about translation, transmission, authorship, author worship, media literacy, Mycelium, Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, Poland, climate change, weebs and everything but the kitchen sink.
I’m amazed by how much spaghetti Jennifer Croft is throwing at the wall in this novel and how much of it sticks. Even when it doesn’t work, when the prose is a little too purple, it kind of still works just in a different way because of the framing of the story.
The Extinction of Irena Rey by Jennifer Croft is a frame story (I can’t get enough of them) in which a woman named Alexis Archer has translated a text (peppering it with extensive footnotes) written by, in their mother tongue, and told from the perspective of one of her fellow translators.
This text, also named The Extinction of Irena Rey, is a personal account of the events that transpired between the author, Alexis Archer, and Irena Rey’s six other translators, most of whom have known each other for over a decade, who’ve travelled to Poland to translate Irena Rey’s latest work.
Of course, hijinks ensue.
Jennifer Croft plays with this framing in interesting ways and that’s what makes this novel special. I enjoyed slowly nibbling away at it while trying to integrate all the disparate ideas in the text into a cohesive whole. Getting to know the translators and how they fit into the bigger picture was enjoyable even though some of them really suck.
I don’t tend to like mystery novels much. The Extinction of Irena Rey is the first mystery novel I’ve enjoyed without any caveats. The mystery that begins to reveal itself as you read the text is not constantly thrown in your face which I appreciated.
Instead, the mystery is the kettle on the stove all these translators are swimming in and butting heads in. The mystery isn’t being used as a carrot on a stick to keep the reader artificially engaged with the story like in some novels.
The mystery is the story and the story is the mystery and everything surrounding it fits nicely together and enhances the rest of the story in a meaningful way.
Spoilers for a mystery-related beat halfway through the novel:
Around midway through the novel, after the initial setup and reveal of the core mystery, one of the translators, Freddie starts an uncharacteristic Detective Poirot-esque monologue where he lists out all the information and clues that the translators have gathered so far and he mentions possible further avenues for their investigation to take.
Considering the tone of the speech and Freddie being the one giving it, I interpret this as a shot being taken by Jennifer Croft at that style of mystery novel and signaling to the reader that she’s trying to do something different.
Why?
The Agathie Christie-esque mystery novel is still very popular and it’s been copied more times than we can count, seemingly by many authors who don’t seem to understand how to bring that genre forth into the modern day in a compelling way.
And, I think that Croft really is doing something different with the mystery in the Extinction of Irena Rey that hits way harder for me than other mystery novels I’ve read.
This novel is begging to be thought about during and after reading it and I love that about it.
It’s not perfect though, I would have preferred fewer paragraphs where Croft uses her characters to speak directly to the reader about her thoughts on translation.
These felt a little redundant and sometimes out of place especially because my beliefs about the art of translation seem to be aligned with Croft’s as presented within the text through the character of Alexis Archer.
A great translation must by necessity transform the text it’s based on to be great and this requires the translator to be just as much of a writer as the original author, if not more.
One cannot know about translators like Margaret Jull Costa especially known for her work translating most of José Saramago’s work into English, a Herculean task I wouldn’t wish upon my greatest enemy, and continue to make reductive claims about a translator’s work being lesser than a writer’s work because, well, translators are writers.
What elevates The Extinction of Irena Rey to a 5/5 for me and allows me to fully enjoy it for what it is despite the minor quibbles I have with it — is how big of a swing it’s taking, how absolutely weird it is and how Croft manages to stick the landing anyway.
I’ll be keeping an eye Jennifer Croft’s work moving forward — she’s at least convinced me that I should be paying attention to her.
Now all I’ve got to do now is figure out how I’m going to deal with all this spaghetti Croft has thrown all around my reading nook.
Slurp Slurp.
Slurp Slurp.
The metafictional swing of The Extinction of Irena Rey piqued my interest and my expectations were more than met. Turns out that a story translated by a translator told from the POV of another translator with both characters directly involved in the story being told is exactly the kind of premise I’m really into.
In the Extinction of Irena Rey, Jennifer Croft puts a lot of big ideas onto the page for the reader to think about. This seems to be common practice in the more “artsy” novels I’ve read. But I was pleasantly surprised by both how interested I was in most of the themes found within the novel and how cohesively woven together they seemed to be.