Does it count as professional narcissism if I want to read a book because it’s about translators?
I first saw an ad for The Extinction of Irena Rey in LitHub, though another bookish friend later mentioned enjoying it. But the only thing that made me add it to my list was translators! mystery! The author, Jennifer Croft, is also a translator of renown (Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights, among others) and that only made the prospect even more tempting.
At its most basic, The Extinction of Irena Rey is about the search for missing Polish author Irena Rey. She’s always been very idiosyncratic about how her translators work, we learn, so this time is no different: she invites them to her house for a summit (as she calls it) and everyone works together to translate her latest work into their respective languages. They can’t talk about the weather, they can’t use their names, they can’t translate any other Polish author. There’s certainly a cult-like element to everything. This time around, however, the cult leader has mysteriously vanished. What to do?
This straightforward series of events is wrapped in multiple levels of metatext. The novel you as a person in the real world are reading is in English, of course, but within the world of the novel this is a translation into English from Polish that was (again, in the world of the novel) originally written by an Argentinian woman. Who just so happens to absolutely despise the translator. Oh, and the imaginary Polish original text is supposedly a fictionalized account of actual events!
This is where I have to regret that I fell so behind with my dorky little book reports here because I know there are a lot of things about the book that I’ve forgotten, in addition to the little scraps I remember but can’t find a place to shoehorn in here. It’s been several months now since I finished it. But I remember that I enjoyed every minute of it: it was weird and unhinged and just incredibly smart.
