My thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for my free digital ARC of The Extinction of Irena Rey! After publishing Homesickness last year, which I loved, renowned Polish & Spanish translator Jennifer Croft has ventured once again into the realm of original fiction, though this one ties closely to her translation work. It features a group of translators from Polish who gather at the home of their ‘Author’ to translate her latest novel. Except when they arrive at their usual summit, the Author is behaving erratically, and eventually goes missing.

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I got strong Olga Tokarczuk vibes from this one, but whether that’s just through my own biases since I’ve read Croft’s English translations of Tokarczuk, I couldn’t say. This feeling is closely linked to the themes of this novel - the relationship between writer and translator, this strange key to wider audiences, both one-sided and not, as translators are trusted to bring the author’s words to languages they cannot comprehend. As a former student of translation, this relationship never fails to fascinate.

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The structure of the book is also fun, as it’s ostensibly a fictional book written by one of the translators about their situation with the author, translated (and edited?) with footnotes by another of the translators. I really enjoyed the tension that’s visible between the author of the novel (the Spanish translator), and the English translator translating it - all played out via the footnotes. Their rivalry isn’t the only lightness to a novel that’s a literary mystery. I thought the whole thing had a sort of frivolity to it.

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Despite my interest in translation, what should have been an engaging mystery, and plenty of humour though, I often found myself disengaged from it. It’s not a long book but it felt sluggish. It took me a full week to read 288 pages, the pacing was just off. The translators who didn’t have a major role to play were also somewhat two-dimensional - though this could have been intentional as Emi (the author of this novel, the Spanish translator - confused yet?) might not have viewed them as tantamount to the story.

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If you’re a fan of meta vibes in your fiction, I’d definitely recommend this odd little novel filled with fungi and forests, musings on translations, and authors behaving badly. It slightly missed the mark for me, but still I enjoyed lots of aspects!