When I started this book project, back in the pandemic, I figured that I would mostly go through the list of the world’s countries alphabetically. That got thrown out the window early on for two reasons. The first is that I keep coming across books set in other countries with no rhyme or reason relative to the alphabet. People put interesting things in Little Free Libraries, and who am I to argue if they take place in Monaco or Luxembourg instead of Belgium or Belize? The second is that I sometimes think that a book is about one country to find out that it’s really about another.
That’s the case with Jennifer Croft’s delightful novel The Extinction of Irena Rey. I was searching for books that take place in Belarus, the next nation on my list alphabetically, when I came across this. It takes place in a wooded corner of Poland that is on the Belarus border, so I thought Belarus might figure into the story. It really doesn’t, and so, I now have a book for a country next door geographically but much further behind it in the alphabet.
This is a great book, too. Jennifer Croft mostly works as a translator. In this novel, she brings together a group of translators who are to translate Irena Rey’s latest novel from Polish to their own language. Rey invites everyone to stay at her sprawling house in the country. And then, Rey disappears, and it turns out that not everyone in the room has actual translation experience.
And then, the story gets really weird. To begin with, part of the novel’s conceit is that it is itself a translation, so the narrator and the translator are two different people with strong opionions about each other. The story bounces between trying to figure out how to translate Rey’s novel, trying to figure out where Rey is, and trying to figure out exactly who all the people in the room are. All of this is in addition to a group of people who do not know each other trying to figure out how to live and work together.
All of these layers shouldn’t work, but they do. I didn’t learn much about Poland, or anything about Belarus, but I thought this was a fantastic story.
