From the International Booker Prize-winning translator and Women's Prize finalist, a propulsive, beguiling novel about eight translators and their search for a world-renowned author who goes missing in a primeval Polish forest.
Eight translators arrive at a house in a primeval Polish forest on the border of Belarus. It belongs to the world-renowned author Irena Rey, and they are there to translate her magnum opus, Gray Eminence. But within days of their arrival, Irena disappears without a trace.
The translators, who hail from eight different countries but share the same reverence for their beloved author, begin to investigate where she may have gone while proceeding with work on her masterpiece. They explore this ancient wooded refuge with its intoxicating slime moulds and lichens, and study her exotic belongings and layered texts for clues. But doing so reveals secrets - and deceptions - of Irena Rey's that they are utterly unprepared for. Forced to face their differences as they grow increasingly paranoid in this fever dream of isolation and obsession, soon the translators are tangled up in a web of rivalries and desire, threatening not only their work but the fate of their beloved author herself.
This hilarious, thought-provoking second outing by award-winning translator and author Jennifer Croft is a brilliant examination of art, celebrity, the natural world, and the power of language. It is an unforgettable, unputdownable adventure with a small but global cast of characters shaken by the shocks of love, destruction, and creation in one of Europe's last great wildernesses.
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'Incredibly strange, savvy, sly, and hard to classify. I also couldn't put it down ... What I did not expect was that Croft's debut would frolic so joyfully, so rigorously, in the absurd, the inane, and stay there from start to finish. Or that I'd end up frolicking with her. Reader, if you're looking to get your heart thrashed, this may not be the novel for you. But if you're up for a romp through a wilderness of ideas, innuendo and ecological intrigue (who knew there even was such a thing?), stay with me ... None of this craziness feels frivolous. On the contrary, the novel's staked in anxieties about climate change, extinction and the unbalancing of nature thanks to art ... Mad with plot and language and gorgeous prose, and the result is a bacchanal, really, which is the opposite of extinction. Such is the irony of art.' -- Fiona Maazel * The New York Times Book Review * 'It's to Croft's credit that she sustains her claustrophobic narrative so deftly, with plenty of plot twists. What ultimately makes this book such a pleasure, though, is the uniqueness of its perspective. Reading a translator translating a translator is a brain-twister like no other, and it can't fail to change the way you think about language.' -- Carrie O'Grady * The Guardian * 'The Extinction of Irena Rey could only be written by a master of language, a tamer of different tongues. It is brilliant, fun, and absolutely alive.' -- Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, author of <em>Chain Gang All Stars</em> 'Croft writes with an extraordinary intensity.' -- Olga Tokarczuk, Nobel Prize-winning author of <em>Flights</em> and <em>Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead</em> '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).' -- Malcolm Forbes * The Washington Post * 'For all its cleverness, The Extinction of Irena Rey is serious about the collective nature of art-making and its interconnectedness with the natural world. What is more, Croft is superb on approaches to literary translation and its orthodoxies (Nabokov hovers at the edges of the text), and she takes some good shots at the cult of the upper-case author into the bargain.' -- Laurel Berger * The Spectator * 'Croft serves up a wickedly funny mystery involving an internationally famous author and her translators ... This is a blast.' -- <i>Publishers Weekly</i>, starred review 'Both gossipy and profound, the novel makes hay with intellectual questions of Croft's day job as well as the nuts-and-bolts aspects of the translation trade.' -- Anthony Cummings * The Observer * 'Wittily tracks eight translators in search of a writer who's gone missing in a Polish forest.' * Financial Times * 'A feast of reading, writing, and translation, by a master of all three.' * Foyles * '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 humour and voluptuous prose.' -- Katie Kitamura, author of <em>Intimacies</em> 'You'll cancel plans to keep reading this addictive novel.' -- Panashe Nyadundu * Elle * 'Croft ... makes for a wickedly funny satirist when it comes to some of the more obsequious behaviours 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.' * Kirkus Reviews * '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.' -- Megha Majumdar, author of <em>A Burning</em> '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.' -- Alexandra Kleeman, author of <em>Something New Under the Sun</em> '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.' -- Emily Nemens, author of <em>The Cactus League</em> '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.' -- Chelsea T. Hicks, author of <em>A Calm & Normal Heart</em> 'Embark on a literary journey like no other in Jennifer Croft's latest masterpiece, where eight translators converge in a mystical Polish forest to decode the magnum opus of the revered author Irena Rey ... Croft's storytelling is both intellectually stimulating and truly enthralling, offering a plot that is genuinely distinctive and captivating. This narrative stands apart from any book I've encountered, delivering a reading experience that is refreshingly unparalleled.' -- Lana McLean * Ramona Magazine * 'Wild ... joyous.' -- Lauren Groff * Bustle * 'The Extinction of Irena Rey playfully dismantles long-standing conceptions of literary translation ... Croft holds everything together with the aplomb of a more seasoned novelist.' -- Alice Whitmore * Sydney Review of Books * 'Croft combines big questions with generous, intuitive humor ... It's a rare book that's equally gifted at provoking thought and laughter. The Extinction of Irena Rey is certainly strange, but it's also strangely beautiful ... Croft has reinvented ecofiction with this seductive, erudite, and terribly funny tale about "book people".' -- Hannah Weber * World Literature Today * 'Absolutely bizarre in the best way, it's a fever dream of deception and desire.' * People * 'A clever literary mystery unfolding within a labyrinth of unreliable narration and translation, it explores with wit and intricacy the ambiguities and contradictions of the translator's art. The author knows whereof she writes - Jennifer Croft is an award-winning translator - and her involuted literary quest should appeal to fans of Nabokov's Pale Fire or Bolano's The Savage Detectives.' -- <i>The Sydney Morning Herald</i>, Fiction pick of the week 'Delightfully wry.' -- <i>Booklist</i>, starred review 'On its surface, The Extinction of Irena Rey is a literary whodunit, with whiffs of ... semiotic absurdity ... 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.' * The Atlantic * 'Croft's writing isn't just highly intricate and well-informed, it's humane.' -- Chris Allnutt * Financial Times * 'Translator Jennifer Croft sends up her vocation in this waggish literary mystery.' * Vanity Fair * '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.' * Chicago Review of Books * 'An astute take on human communication and the perils of the planet, embedded in a crafty detective mystery.' * On the Seawall * 'The Extinction of Irena Rey puts translators first, and with humour and grace explores art, celebrity, and the power of language.' * Lit Hub * 'The building unease of the plot is offset by the back and forth between Emi's text and Alexis's footnotes, which add humour even as they cast doubt on events. Readers are left unsure what to trust, as the novel questions if true, accurate translation is possible and what is lost along the way ... a metatextual feast that will keep readers wondering even after the book concludes.' -- <i>Library Journal</i>, starred review 'In time with the steady unveiling of Irena's skeletons, the novel muses through questions related to aestheticism, Anthropocene ethics, method writing, awards-committee politics, and personal rivalries. Grey Eminence is unpacked, including its dystopian perspective that "art is the uniquely human impulse to relentlessly transform whatever we come into contact with, to undo in order to do or redo." Exciting developments temper the story's headiness leading up to its final, disillusioning confrontation. The Extinction of Irena Rey is an incisive literary novel that troubles the divide between art, its interpretation, and real life.' -- Michelle Anne Schingler * Foreword Reviews * 'Through this trippy mix of high concept and high tension, Croft takes a real chunk out of the convention of deifying the author as an all-powerful genius to whom translators must be beholden. Reading The Extinction of Irena Rey is like encountering a mischievous forest spirit, full of riddles, and gloriously disorienting, then somehow getting back out of the woods alive.' -- Cat Acree * Bookpage * 'Croft's novel is about a lot of things: the complexities and beauties of translation, climate change, and the mass extinction of species, art's potential to save or destroy the world, obsession, lust, and much more.' -- Ilana Masad * NPR * 'Wrought in lively prose and complemented by a dazzling suite of metatextual 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.' * The Rumpus * 'The Extinction of Irena Rey is bursting with energy and cleverness, Croft's abundant linguistic gifts and stimulating ideas on display.' * New York Review of Books * 'A dizzying novel ... Croft's sense of humour 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.' * Alta Journal * 'Croft's exquisite facility with language is on full display throughout, both in wordplay and in evocative descriptions, particularly of place.' * BookReporter * 'Bloody love this book. I think it's really well done, incredibly clever, perceptive, and playful and great in many many ways and also just opens up these much broader conversations about narrative, about translation, about ownership, and authorship. I just think it's brilliant and clever in so so many ways and I really take my hat off to Jennifer Croft for crafting something so elaborate and clever and thoughtful.' * Bob the Bookerer * 'This is a thrilling read, particularly for anyone who fancies themselves au fait with the goings-on of the international literary world. The Extinction of Irena Rey is immensely fun.' -- Ellen Peirson-Hagger * Prospect * 'A joyous and wickedly funny collision of mystery thriller, weird fiction, and literary satire bound up in a metafictional bow, it is simultaneously a deeply serious reflection on the nature of translation and linguistic identity and a playful riff on the absurdities of literary celebrity and the personalities it attracts ... The result is deliciously weird, wildly entertaining, and often oddly profound, suggesting translation stitches the world together just as fungal mycelium transforms forests into networks of communication.' -- James Bradley * The Saturday Paper * 'Jennifer Croft's fascinating read focuses on the power and influence of language itself, without which we'd have no stories to pass on.' -- Saskia Kemsley * The Standard * 'It is a fearsome and sometimes confusing mesh of delightful and alarming elements that offers great pleasures on first reading, but also seems to insist on further, more careful examinations.' -- Jonathan Gibbs * TLS * 'Croft's insight into the power of language shines through the quest to find the author in a novel that also has much to say about the nature of literature and celebrity.' -- Charlie Connelly * The New European * Praise for Homesick:
'Through photographs and prose, Croft's genre-blending memoir investigates how chronic illness sickens an entire family ... A heartbreaking, vanguard, and mixed-media coming-of-age memoir.' * Booklist * Praise for Homesick:
'Haunting and visually poetic, Croft's book explores the interplay between words and images and the complexity of sisterly bonds with intelligence, grace, and sensitivity. Poignant, creative, and unique.' * Kirkus Reviews * Praise for Homesick:
'In this marvel of a book that magically expresses the untranslatable, Croft follows Amy's tortured path as she asks how far, and in what way, we are responsible for how loved ones' lives play out. In her struggle to answer such questions, Amy learns the extent and limitations of love's power.' * Foreword Reviews *
Jennifer Croft won a Guggenheim Fellowship for The Extinction of Irena Rey, and her debut Homesick won the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing and was longlisted for the Women's Prize, while her translation of Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk's Flights won the International Booker Prize. She is the translator of Federico Falco's A Perfect Cemetery, Romina Paula's August, Pedro Mairal's The Woman from Uruguay, and Olga Tokarczuk's The Books of Jacob. She has also received the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature.
