The Extinction of Irena Rey

Reviews

A great homage to the art of translation and the circulatory system of language. Croft serves up a wickedly funny mystery involving an internationally famous author and her translators . . . This is a blast. [The Extinction of Irena Rey] is a metatextual feast that will keep readers wondering even after the book concludes. Wild . . . joyous. A wild and wonderfully unruly novel about translation and transmission, The Extinction of Irena Rey is a showcase for Jennifer Croft’s acrobatic intellect, delicious humor, and voluptuous prose. Croft writes with an remarkable intensity. A wild, twisty literary adventure reflecting on the art of translation and the power of language. Mischievous and intellectually provocative, The Extinction of Irena Rey asks thrilling questions about the wilderness of language, the life of the forest, and the feral ambitions and failings of artists. Generous and strange, funny and disconcerting, The Extinction of Irena Rey is a playground for the mind and an entrancing celebration of the sociality of reading, writing, and translation written by a master practitioner of all three. In The Extinction of Irena Rey, Jennifer Croft mines the complexity of translation, adoration, and symbiosis. At once a meditation on the networks required to bring literature to worldwide readers and a page-turner about the inevitable fallibilities of those systems, Extinction's push and pull is both thought-provoking and thrilling. I was rapt. Deliciously twisty . . . I find it fascinating how Croft depicts the author-translator relationship as a kind of adversarial dialogue, with two people tussling to control the meaning of a text. A rollicking romp that follows a group of translators as they search for their missing author through the primeval forest of Bialowieza; months later, part of my brain is still wandering among those trees. Delightfully wry. Croft . . . makes for a wickedly funny satirist when it comes to some of the more obsequious behaviors involved in the translator-author relationship. At the same time—even in the midst of a joke—she writes profoundly about the philosophical stakes of translation. The Extinction of Irena Rey could only be written by master of language, a tamer of different tongues. It is brilliant, fun and absolutely alive. An exquisite pleasure. Croft unearths the interconnection between land and communities, revealing the collaborative networks of forests as clearly and incisively as she does that of the literary world. In this exquisite pleasure of a novel, in which I luxuriated on every page, Croft mines the vicissitudes of the translation world to reveal quite plainly that everything is connected, and translators deserve more. Homesick, is . . . boundary-pushing, or boundary-expanding . . . a translator's Bildungsroman, one in which art is first a beacon, then a home. Every page of this stunning and surprising book turns words around and around. Croft moves quickly between powerful scenes that made me think about my own sisters. I love how the language displays a child's consciousness. A haunting accomplishment. Oh my mushrooms, The Extinction of Irena Rey is incredibly strange, savvy, sly and hard to classify. I also couldn’t put it down . . . mad with plot and language and gorgeous prose, and the result is a bacchanal. The Extinction of Irena Rey surprised me at every turn, moving between profound observations about nature, art, and communication . . . and surreal and baffling happenings that push the characters into a kind of fever-dream reality. Croft has certainly added ‘novelist’ to the list of writing-related skills she excels at, and what a joy that is to witness. Croft subverts expectations with a blackly comic, fiercely inventive drama that explores the cult of celebrity and the art of translation (an art this critically acclaimed, award-winning translator has mastered). As bewildering and beckoning as its cover, Jennifer Croft’s locked-room mystery is something like Agatha Christie or Knives Out on mushrooms—ones not unlike those in the book itself. Absolutely bizarre in the best way, it's a fever dream of deception and desire. Croft has constructed a canny exploration of how even English, despite its unique dominance, might be influenced by its brushes with the mysterious process that is translation. Translator Jennifer Croft sends up her vocation in this waggish literary mystery. Wrought in lively prose and complemented by a dazzling suite of meta-textual hijinks set to the beat of a mystery novel, The Extinction of Irena Rey is an empathetic and comic investigation of the role of the translator within the literary project. Croft spins such a seductive tale, it’s impossible not to get sucked in. Croft has reinvented ecofiction with this seductive, erudite, and terribly funny tale about 'book people.' The Extinction of Irena Rey is bursting with energy and cleverness, Croft’s abundant linguistic gifts and stimulating ideas on display An interpersonal cacophony that crackles outward. . . a cleverly layered, multivocal novel that plays with our expectations of who is speaking and how meaning gets made in between authors, translators, and readers. An astute take on human communication and the perils of the planet, embedded in a crafty detective mystery. A dizzying novel . . . Croft’s sense of humor and her finely drawn characters combine with her gift for depicting the beautiful but forbidding Bialowieza 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. The Extinction puts translators first, and with humor and grace explores art, celebrity, and the power of language. Croft's exquisite facility with language is on full display throughout, both in wordplay and in evocative descriptions, particularly of place. An incisive literary novel that troubles the divide between art, its interpretation, and real life. [A] fun house of a debut novel . . . [The Extinction of Irena Rey] becomes not just a literary thriller but an examination of the delicate mix of desire, impersonation, ambition, and selfishness that the art of literary translation requires. Jennifer Croft is the renowned translator of Olga Tokarczuk and this debut takes full advantage of her background in the best way possible. Bizarre and brilliant . . . above all tremendous fun . . . The Extinction of Irena Rey teems with rabbit-hole delights at every turn right up to the delicious final twist. Croft never misses a beat, drawing upon her translation background to deliver a juicy, bordering on absurd, intricate mediation on celebrity, communication, nature and the art of language. The Extinction of Irena Rey complects and complicates the relationships between translation and border politics, art and nature, image and text, truth and myth. It is about not just the extinction of its demigod-like author, but, perhaps, all of us. A fascinating exploration of art, celebrity, jealousy, and the wonders of nature. Expand reviews