In her satirical debut novel, The Extinction of Irena Rey, Jennifer Croft serves up all the controversial, inherently political questions posed by translation, and warps them into a ghoulishly funny tale.
If you’ve read Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s Booker Prize-winning Flights or The Books of Jacob in English, then you’ve also read the work of Jennifer Croft, her accomplished translator. The Extinction of Irena Rey is Croft’s first novel, and it has a delightfully clever metafictional premise: Irena Rey, an enigmatic and brilliant author, has vanished after bringing eight translators to her home in the heart of an ancient Polish forest, ostensibly to begin translating her latest masterwork. The scramble to solve the mystery of Irena’s disappearance is heightened by Croft’s conceit that The Extinction of Irena Rey was written and translated by two of the translator characters. As you follow them through the woods hunting for clues, you’ll wonder how this account could have been skewed or altered by its layers of linguistic permutations.
This surprising, thoughtful picture book introduces an endearing cast of characters and conveys emotions as furry, amicable creatures.
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