This was published earlier this year. It's by Jennifer Croft, whose name was familiar to me because she translated Flights by Olga Tokarczuk. And yes, coming hot on the heels of Rebecca F. Kuang's Babel, this is another novel about translation.

More specifically, it records the gathering of eight translators, at a house located near Bialowieza Forest. This is one of the most significant wooded areas in Europe, and it's currently under threat from logging (in reality, as well as in the book). We're in Poland, near to the border with Belarus, into which territory the forest also extends.

The translators have been summoned by "Our Author", the Irena Rey of the title, to work on her new book, Grey Eminence. This scenario reminded me of The Translators, a 2019 movie by Regis Roinsard. But "translation communities" exist for real, and Croft's acknowledgments pay tribute to Tokarczuk, "an author utterly adored by her translators into all languages".

So we have our eight acolytes ("We worshipped her," says the narrator. "That was the truth"). Their job is to translate from Polish, and they're initially so depersonalized that they're known just by the names of their languages: Spanish, English, German, French, Swedish, Serbian, Slovenian, and Ukrainian. They are welcomed by an author who is behaving increasingly oddly, and we're not many pages into the story before Irena Rey disappears altogether. So they try to find her, and all sorts of stuff starts to come out of the woodwork.

A simple mystery story, then? Nooooo... Anything but.


The luridly organic design of the cover is very representative of the book's hyperbole

You see, the "I" who is telling the story is Spanish. (She's called Emi, we eventually find out. And she's designated Spanish because of her language; she's not Spanish by nationality but rather Argentinian.) Adding another step of complication, she's writing the story not in her mother tongue but in Polish. And it's being translated by English, aka Alexis. Alexis also figures as a character in the story, and Emi detests her.

Now, this was clearly explained, right at the beginning, in "A Note From the Translator" (the fictional translator, ie Alexis). But I swear I was 30 per cent into the book before I truly got it...

Once you do wrap your head around this duality, though, it becomes very funny, because Alexis uses footnotes not only to elucidate points, but also to argue with the author, and remind the reader that this is all fiction.

We find ourselves, therefore, with an unreliable narrator expressing herself in a language not her own (as Alexis puts it: "The spirit of Spanish comes whooshing through the walls of every paragraph, breaking plates and continually flicking the light switch"), and also with an unreliable translator who has a bone to pick, and clearly aknowledges that she has "improved" the original, and "deleted certain scenes".

As Fiona Maazel comments: "Woe to the real-life translator who will have to take on this challenge in, say, Punjabi."

I also failed to spot, until prodded by Rhian Sasseen, that there's an allegorical subtext to the tumultuous relationship between the narrator and the translator: "The rivalry between Alexis and Emi -- between English and Spanish -- becomes an opportunity for Croft to enact a subtle criticism of the Anglophone world's resistance to learning other languages, and of the global dominance of English... Alexis shares a foot size with Irena and at one point begins to wear the missing author's shoes -- English threatening to take over Polish."

As you'd expect from a novelist who's also a translator (Croft, I mean, not Emi -- jeepers...), this book expresses much that is insightful about the business of capturing a text in a different language:

-- "Translation is being forced to write a book again."

-- "As translators, we were accustomed to muting our own voices."

-- "A translation is a new experience of something that is essentially, fundamentally the same."

-- And there's always that odd relationship between the translator and the author: "We treated her every word as sacred, even though our whole task was to replace her every word... We had been sworn to shuttle her sideways, into our other languages, new worlds where she'd be increasingly sought after, talked about. Protected. Desired."


Life is full of translation...

The Extinction of Irena Rey, however, is also a novel of winding-down:

-- "Our Author" is disintegrating, and the novel charts the way in which the reverence with which the translators initially treat her is gradually reduced to "rubble and ash". The wise, liberal, environmentalist author we have been introduced to at the beginning turns out to be a kleptomaniac fabulist, inventing stories about her family and about a previous translator; stealing episodes wholesale from people's lives; keeping files on all the translators, with a view to further harvesting material she can potentially use ("she had chosen us not because we were good translators, but because we made good characters"); and literally stealing from museums... It's a clever bit of narrative, shining a light on cultural appropriation, literary appropriation, and the cult of celebrity, all in one entertaining package.

-- Left to its own devices, the translation team is falling apart too, as its members inadvertently trash Irena's house, fall out with each other, fall in love with each other, and rampage round doing a range of ever more OTT things. But they're not JUST disintegrating. They're also emerging from participation in a monolithic cult of Irena-worship to become individuals, with all the aggro that involves.

-- The area (a borderland for centuries, "not so much changing hands as hovering") has never really recovered from its often violent history either. There are some strange characters abroad, and we hear often about the resentment shown towards migrants and strangers. Ghosts often flicker at the edge of things. There's a distinct lack of solidity.

-- The forest is increasingly under threat, with tree-destroying people and equipment always present either on the sidelines or centre-stage. Before she disappears, Irena laments: "Bialowieza isn't a place! ... It's a network! ... Remove the trees, and you sever every link!" (It is literally a network, we're told, since the mycelium, a network of living threads, connects individual plants and trees, and weaves them into a whole. This term also becomes an illustration of the work of translation: "What we do is mycelial. What we do as translators is stitch the world into a united and communicating whole.")

-- More generally, the natural world in which the translators find themselves is full of disruptions (storms, power cuts, even a tornado, animals in unexpected places).

-- The disintegrating relationship between the environment and art is one of the most intriguing threads in this theme-rich novel: "It seemed to me Irena's novel was suggesting that our current extinction event -- in which hundreds of thousands of species, maybe millions, were dying out all around us, right before our refusing eyes -- was the direct result of art. Painting, sculpture, literature -- even language itself, a system of abstractions intended to stand in for the real world. That was the key: Every creation that served as a substitute for what was given in nature was art... Irena seemed to be saying our art impulse stemmed from our rejection of mortality, our abject rage at being fleeting. We were the only species so uncomfortable with passing away that we would sacrifice everything living to make anything permanent." Croft herself expresses in an interview her frustration with "this reverential way of talking about 'people telling their stories,' and art-making as just the greatest and most noble thing that we can do as human beings... There is, to my mind, the possibility that we are overly obsessed, as a culture, with creating, and particularly with the 'individual genius' we hope to find who is constantly creating something new when we’re surrounded by fascinating forests, for example, that are full of creatures we don’t really understand yet." Interesting...

-- We also explore the disconnect between history and memory. One of the questions in the Reading Group Guide on the author's site is this: "'Notwithstanding that this is obviously fiction, I nonetheless remember this differently,' Alexis writes in one footnote... How might the novel relate to conversations about perspective and memory in a post-truth era?" The translator artifice is a great way of exploring that question.

-- And then there's the unsettling of language itself... As Chris John Poole puts it: "Bialowieza’s fluidity ... seeps into language itself... Croft therefore seeks to disrupt language’s certainties and efface its borders, employing a rich blend of puns, misapprehensions, and malapropisms. Beyond furnishing the novel with its wit, these features erode the thin lines within and between languages, concepts, and categories."


BIG

The title itself weaves together many of these themes. The "extinction" of something... Too often we talk as though extinction just comes about of its own accord. The dodo "became extinct", for example. But we need to remember the way the word is used in other contexts. The extinction of a fire, after all, involves someone acting to stop something existing. Rather than talking vaguely about the dodo becoming extinct, we need to specify that it was PEOPLE who extinguished the dodo. Emi's story ends when she shoots Irena Rey. So the "fictional" Irena Rey is literally extinguished. Put out. But authors can be extinguished in plenty of other ways, of course (by the circulation of harmful narratives about them). As with nature, we don't even know what we're extinguishing half the time... And the "real" Irena Rey survives, Alexis informs us, and goes on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (in 2026). But what if it's a dinosaur-type extinction? Brought about by a cataclysmic event that has nothing to do with humans? The extinction of art, for example, by the avenging environment?

This plethora of themes, fascinating though it is, hints at the novel's major flaw, I think. There's just too much going on...

Couple that overloading with the hyperactive behaviour of the translators, who set in motion a positively baroque chain of events, and it's not hard to see why the reader might end the book with a feeling of complete exhaustion...

It's definitely enjoyable. It's often funny. It's thought-provoking right to the end. But for me it strayed just that little bit too far into the overloaded and outrageous category.