Mushrooms lie in wait amid a forest of blue trees on the cover of Jennifer Croft’s debut novel, The Extinction of Irena Rey. These delicate chestnut-colored fungi, created by American artist Inka Essenhigh, convey the otherworldly feel of the story inside. But what follows is no mere fairy tale, for Croft‘s intriguing plot fits right into the United Nations Decade of Ecosystems Restoration (2021–2030). Weaving modern ecological woes among ancient myths, she nestles the whole lot into a timely saga of translation. It’s an astute take on human communication and the perils of the planet, embedded in a crafty detective mystery. Or is it?
Eight translators gather in Poland at the home of celebrated author Irena Rey. On the edge of Belarus in the primeval Białowieża Forest, they’re eager to translate Rey’s magnum opus, Grey Eminence, for they worship Our Author. She welcomes the group in unseasonably hot weather: “hotter and drier than it had been in ten thousand years.” Then poof! Irena disappears into her office. It takes a while for the group to realize that Our Author is not coming out because she’s no longer there. That’s when the octet sheds monikers of German, Serbian, Slovenian, English, Spanish, Polish, French, and Swedish — henceforth identified by their actual names, as their unique personalities emerge.
What we read is a first-person account narrated by Spanish translator Emilia from Argentina, who writes her version of the astonishing events that develop over seven weeks. One of Irena’s most devoted admirers, Emi is likely motivated by the shock of her idol’s disappearance, plus her recognition of a good tale, as if a book about what happened to translators of a world-renowned author might be akin to a plant sprouting among refuse and waste.
But it is the English translator, Alexis, who is rendering Emi’s story from Spanish into her own language. She inserts footnotes that inject her voice into Emi’s writing, such as: “Over its entire lifetime, a bee makes one-twelfth of a teaspoon of honey. This isn’t really related to the book at hand. I just thought it was interesting. (Trans.)” Since Emi regards her with distaste, Alexis undoubtedly has a desire to rewrite history on her own terms. Has this resentment affected the fidelity of her translation?
These entertaining hijinks are also quite dramatic — and often hilariously preposterous — as the group juggles the translation of Irena’s manuscript from Polish into their respective tongues while searching for their venerated author while the forest is being cut down around them.
Given Croft’s wide experience in translation, one rightfully expects insights about how translation happens — and she does not disappoint, often serving it up in satire. As Emi states:
“It felt like we’d each started writing our own story about Irena now, each in the genre that suited us best. Alexis was writing a mystery novel, Chloe an illustrated psychodrama taking major cues from true crime, Freddie Nordic autofiction, more understated and more boring. I wondered what kind of story mine would be.”
By this point, Croft is pulling off a successful performance of dexterity, spinning multiple storylines in the air. She tosses up yet another character — Leszek (Leshy), guardian of the forest in Slavic mythology — a shapeshifter. Croft casts this tree spirit as a disquieting park ranger. Irena had practically shaken her little ensemble by their lapels upon arrival to establish her environmental concerns:
“Yet now she stood, ripped up all her pages, threw them in our faces, and screamed: ‘Białowieża isn’t a place! Don’t you get that? It’s a network!’ She was pacing, wringing her hands. ‘Remove the trees, and you sever every link! I haven’t slept once since they started chopping down the spruce trees in the spring! Are you not aware of what’s been happening? Have you not been moved?’ She grabbed her head, and I grimaced since it looked to me like she was going to rip her hair out. But then she sank back down into her chair and whimpered, ‘What are we going to do?’”
I was struck throughout by Croft’s ability to fashion believable characters within a hyperbolic situation. I think of The Overstory by Richard Powers, which drew on the work of Suzanne Simard, the scientist who first researched the way trees communicate. Croft cites a quotation from Simard as an epigraph. Although Irena’s similar passion is palpable, Croft wields a jocular tone that reveals the naïveté, confusion, rivalries, and mixed motives of her ensemble.
Croft inventively utilizes the term biodiversity in its broadest sense. Standing for the variety of all living things and their interactions, it naturally includes humans. Thus as Croft observes organic relationships among plants, she also scrutinizes psychological connections between language interpreters. She debates the difference between nonnative and invasive, wondering how translators might be categorized.
Leaving no linguistic stone unturned, Croft weaves in Esperanto, the international language developed by L.L. Zamenhof in 1887 to allow communication in a neutral language, thereby avoiding what might be lost in translation. Spomenka Štimec played up this point in her 2017 novel Croatian War Nocturnal (translated by Sebastian Schulman) in which a Croatian Esperanto activist tries to understand language collapse during Yugoslavia’s disintegration. Croft toys with the concept of elimination, yoking it to a multitude of ideas. For example, Freddie poses an interesting question:
“’Did you know that a quarter of the languages spoken on our planet are spoken in the planet’s greatest forests?’ said Freddie …’ — odd Irena never thought of that — the extinction of languages, it seems like she would care about that, too.’”
Croft calls translation “a kind of recycling” and mentions “the circulatory system that was language.” Irena stresses the important relationship between language and culture, as Emi explains:
“For these were the kinds of cultural activities Irena expected us to take part in. Language and culture were conjoined, she argued, and without some comprehension of her region’s traditions, her words would carry no real weight when we remade them, and our translations would slide right off the page.”
Croft’s own exceptional translations range widely, from her 2018 Man Booker International Prize-winning Polish-to-English conversion of Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights, to a recent Ukrainian children’s tale of two charming moles named Purl and Crawly in Who Will Make the Snow? by Taras Drokhasko and Marjana Drokhasko (translated from Ukrainian with Boris Dralyuk). Croft’s previous book, Homesick, a memoir about her sister, earned the 2020 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. She initiated the #TranslatorsOnTheCover movement (with writer Mark Haddon and the Society of Authors) to highlight the identities of those who create global audiences for literature.
Social media also play a role in the search for Our Author. Philosopher Paul Woodruff wonders, in his final book Surviving Technology: Lessons from Theater (published posthumously in January 2024), whether we can rescue treasures of the past. He calls rescue “a kind of translation,” saying: “What we do not rescue becomes a fossil, an object of merely antiquarian interest.” He suggests “creating experiences that will have an effect on us today that is equivalent to an ancient audience’s experience of the original.” Perhaps Croft is rescuing through translation here in The Extinction of Irena Rey, staging a play for readers as audience via the written word.
As Irena’s perceived life peels away, the wordlings notice Our Author’s values gradually disappearing as well. Forest bathing (Shinrin-yoku) appears to have negative effects in addition to well-documented positive ones. Her insistence on no alcohol use and sex, and her championing of veganism, start to vanish. The translators become aware of their icon’s feet of clay up there on her pedestal. Looking down, we realize theirs are clay also. Certitude, it would seem, has a shaky foundation.
“Yes,” said Freddie, the Swede. “The forest is a tangled web of wanton violence. It holds power over us because it summons our animal selves from deep within us, where they have been repressed, and because it urges us toward destruction — our own and everything else’s.”
Why did this smart novel stand out to me? Because it’s not formulaic — and for all its emphasis on climate change, the novel isn’t Croft’s gambit to placate publishing’s algorithm. French translator Chloe admonishes the group: “Don’t be literal.” There’s a subtext simmering just below the surface. The familiar dichotomy of purity and toxicity, which rules so much of our political thinking and expression, slowly breaks down into a compelling if disturbing take on contemporary rhetoric. There is no moral purity here.
Jennifer Croft approaches abstract expressionism à la artist Clyfford Still’s motto: “It’s intolerable to be stopped by a frame’s edge.” Croft, too, pushes against the conventions of fiction — while fashioning them into an unpredictable and revelatory narrative. It’s as if she were refashioning Dante Alighieri’s Inferno, Canto I:
“Midway upon the journey of our life / I found myself within a forest dark, / For the straightforward pathway had been lost.” (Translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)
[Published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA on March 5, 2024, 320 pages, $28.99 US hardback, $20.29 ebook, $22.00 audiobook. To purchase from Bookshop.org, click here.]