An audio book.
It begins with a translator's note, telling us that the translator is a character in the piece which was written in Polish, the narrator living in South America, translating into Spanish.
Irena, having written 2 unsuccessful novels, married and had a book successfully filmed. With the money she bought a house by a Polish forest. Bogdan is her husband. Her team of 8 translators are invited there for her latest book, "Grey Eminence". They're nameless, labelled by their language. The Czech translator has died. There's a new, male, sexy Swedish translator. The others are female. They speak only in Polish, their only common tongue. There's an interest in fungi - a rare slime-mould - and extinction. The forest is dying. There are non-native species.
Irena disappears, first e-mailing them each a copy of the book. Bogdan has disappeared too. They each read part of the book (over 900 pages), summarising it to the others. The book's protagonist, Amalia is the first climate-change artist. Is Amalia Irena's alter-ego? She's a literary top-predator without enemies? They break into her bedroom. It has many contemporary Japanese books. The translators look in the surrounding wood for her - it has wild boar and bad symbols. Old trees could fall. A quarter of the world's languages are in the great forests.
The Swede, Freddie, breaks a taboo by asking for the narrator's name. She's Emilia. Her mother was a therapist and her father owned a condom company. He says he's a budding poet. His wife is Bogdana, who left Poland when a gallery she was guarding was burgled.
They all start breaking taboos - they use their names and question Irena's writing. Chloe's nearly hit with an arrow - are they under attack? They gather to discuss evidence. Irena seemed out of sorts before she disappeared - perhaps what they saw was Lashie, the fabled guardian of the forest - a shape-shifter. Emilia thinks that a forest-ranger they met could be Lashie. Irena has a basement stocked with alcohol where she grows fungi. Perhaps she was poisoned by the final meal they shared?
Pavel, the Czech translator, isn't dead. He meets the narrator. He and Irena were lovers for years, breaking up when he got her pregnant. She miscarried. Irena's father didn't die in a duel. He lives next door, 100 years old. He thinks Irena might have gone to Japan. Freddie and Emelia have sex for a few nights. The English translator Alexis receives an e-mail from Irena, asking for the latest translation. She sends it, not realising that the e-mail's a fake. The Nobel's announced. She doesn't get it (but will 9 years later). Barbara (a Polish author who Irena hates) turns up to say that she and Irena are off to Belarus to collaborate. A parrot comes to live with them. It eats an all but extinct native beatle.
The team hurry to complete the translation - Amalia dies, the forests are in danger They weren't allowed to translate other authors, but now they admit that they secretly do. The narrator (who hates Alexis) thinks Alexis and Freddie are becoming close friends. Alexis starts wearing Irena's clothes. Emlia reads Alexis' translation and sees that a section's missing. They realise that Irena's been using parts of their lives as material for her novel, and that Irena had stolen ancient artefacts in the house. Was Bogdan trying to return them to museums? Alexis and Emilia have a duel. Both miss. Emilia looks at files on Irena's computer. There's a draft about Translators - minotaurs who feast on flesh. There's a section on each of them - were they chosen because of their sad lives? Emilia's described as a submissive loser, providing the novel's comic relief.
Diggers are invading the forest. Emilia gets an article published and protesters appear. The translators have been there for over 6 weeks. Emilia, using social media, thinks she knows where to find Irena. They hire a van and head for an abandoned Berlin airport. They find some of Irena's and their possessions in the lost-and-found office. Irena shoots an arrow at them from a rooftop. They kill her, take her body home and burn it, along with the house, blaming the Polish Government for it (they wanted to keep her quiet), vowing to keep her words alive. Bogdan had been e-mailing them, pretending to be Irena.
It scored only 3.2 on Goodreads. Having read some reviews after having completed the book, I realise I've missed a lot. I'm impressed. I was expecting the team to become a replacement for the missing writer, perhaps dying one by one until only 1 or 2 were left. For me there are too many red-herrings/loose-ends - the cellar, the duel, Bogdana, Amadou.
Other reviews
- tonysreadinglist (We’re supposedly reading the English-language translation of a novel first written in Polish, a fictionalised account of the translation summit penned by Emilia, Rey’s Spanish-language translator. To make things even more complicated, Alexis Archer, the American doing the translating, is also a character in the novel, and you get the feeling that this is no labour of love ... the translators attempt to work out what’s going on, the various rivalries and attractions are played out, with surprise visitors turning up to add to the tension. It’s all rather OTT at times, with the translators coming apart at the seams the longer they’re left to their own devices. And yet, they’re not just disintegrating, but also emerging as individuals, in a way they couldn’t when Their Author was present. ... The Extinction of Irena Rey is also a densely plotted story, with plenty of Tokarczuk Easter eggs for the devoted. For example, there’s a notable focus on fungi, and the idea of mycelia, the great underground systems of interconnected plant-life. This also plays a prominent role in Tokarczuk’s early novel Primeval and Other Times)
- Carrie O'Grady (the text we are reading, written by Spanish, has itself been translated by another of the eight, English – and Spanish and English do not get along. English makes it clear, in her prefatory Note from the Translator, that she has her suspicions about Spanish’s version of events, and has “corrected” a few things as she went along. So we are faced with a (possibly) unreliable narrator, translated by a (possibly) unreliable translator. It’s a hall of mirrors worthy of Nabokov ... Croft just about manages to keep it all together, although her fondness for themes and metaphors comes at the expense of character development. The warring English and Spanish are a marvellous double act, but others who could also have been interesting (Serbian and Slovenian, for instance) are neglected. And the ending, which unites the group once more, falls a little flat)
- Chris Rutledge (Croft is well suited to write a story about translators, and one is tempted to read much into her background. Best known for her campaign to have translators (deservedly) named on the covers of the books they help shape, she herself is a Booker Prize-winning translator of Olga Tokarczuk’s novel Flights, among other works. Emilia is her avatar here ... One weakness is the somewhat fantastical nature of Irena’s disappearance. Her motivations and methods remain inscrutable, and the translators’ search for her has a bit of a knockabout feel to it.)
- Chris John Poole (The Extinction of Irena Rey provides no single stand-in for its author; instead, a network of interlinked characters echo Croft’s own life. ... Rey’s home underlines the disconnect between abstracted selves and the real people who create them. Similarly, the surrounding forest, Bialowieza, reveals the divide between nature’s fluidity and the artificial limits imposed on it. Its boundaries are rigidly drawn: a border splits Belarus from Poland; fences wall off private property; xenophobes view migrants as intruders. Yet the underlying ecosystem remains hybridising and amorphous ... To some extent, Emilia and Alexis embody two prevalent translation approaches, and the poles of the novel’s core dichotomy. Emilia, an endlessly faithful translator, wrestles with Alexis, who willingly transforms and rewrites.)
- Ilana Masid (If your head is spinning at the layers here — a novel within a novel that is actually a translation of a Polish novel based on real events written by a non-native Polish speaker — you're exactly where you should be, and you're in for a delightful adventure. ... 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. But perhaps more than anything else, it is about how impossible it is for anything living to be entirely, absolutely individual and independent.)
- Lyle Rhytis (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. It is particularly delightful for those with a brain for literary puzzles, Easter eggs, and books within books. ... The book The Extinction of Irena Rey is most indebted to is Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire ... Without access to Emilia’s original, we are forced to draw our own conclusions from a rollicking interplay of an unreliable translation of an unreliable text. Admittedly, some readers might find their suspension of disbelief taxed a bit too much at times: the translators’ actions are initially a bit too servile and, by the book’s close teeter toward the unbelievable.)
