The Extinction of Irena Rey
Overview
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 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 molds 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.
Details
- Format
- Size
- Extent
- ISBN
- RRP
- Pub date
- Rights held
- Other rights
- Paperback
- 234mm x 153mm
- 320 pages
- 9781761380211
- AUD$35.00
- 27 February 2024
- UK & Commonwealth (ex. Can)
- Don Congdon Associates
Categories
Praise
‘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.’
‘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.’
About the Author
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.
