2025 #25 The Extinction of Irena Rey (Croft)

 

The Extinction of Irena Rey by Jennifer Croft
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The premise--a translation of a story about translators and translation authored by a translator--is clever, yes. What I didn't expect was the humor that springs up like an unexpected mushroom in a field of moss. That gives it a 3. 75 for me.
There are moments of meta-translation like:
"Her face was the white of a freshly laundered sheet that someone other than me had laundered. (My laundry always turns out beige or gray.)" In this humble offering from Emi, we see how imagery in translation always connects to experience in one way or the other (remembering that the text we are reading was in fact written in Spanish, and we are reading it translated into English). Croft skillfully uses the slightly askew simile to call out some of the challenges of translation. But this is all operating on a deeper level, and occasionally detracts from surface-level enjoyment of the book.

The book is complex, sometimes overly so, and the narrator becomes increasingly unlikeable in her high-school level emotional intelligence (this is, however, somewhat soothed by the occasional footquips (as opposed to footnotes) from the translator (Alexis), who is somewhat of an arch-nemesis figure for the author (Emi) throughout most of the book (although the reason why is never totally clear, save for Emi's need to assign blame somewhere)). Apologies for the excessive parentheses in the previous sentence. The descriptions of nature and fungi are beautiful, but we are quickly yanked out of any idyll of the primeval Polish forest toward a speculative fiction that resembles Mr. Toad's Wild Ride. There's a lot of ideological whiplash and flights of fancy that did not enrich my experience of the book, clever thought it is. There's a mystery too -- the titular Irena Rey goes missing-- but I stopped caring too soon in the book.

I am glad I read it, and there were definitely parts of the book I thought were glorious in prose and imagination. But at the end I felt I had finished putting together a piece of furniture, and found myself looking at several screws and bolt or two that were "left over."

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