Jennifer Croft

The Extinction of Irena Rey

Laura Dobie

Schulz showed us his name on the wall, inscribed, he said, at some wild party in 1986, and we knew that if Irena had posted a clear picture sooner, it would never have come to this. We would háve found her in time not to find out what kind of person she was: not noble, but cheap, thieving. Base. Her genius wasn't hers: It was everybody else's.

She eluded us at every counter. It felt like we had leaped into a movie that someone else had paused.

It often happens when I translate that I reword a phrase over and over, unable to get it quite right, only to realize that the problem lies earlier in the sentence, or even earlier in the paragraph, and that if I go back and solve that, the troublesome phrase will suddenly become perfect without requiring any alteration at all, and I thought perhaps that was the case here, too. Maybe we'd been searching for the wrong Irena.

Having come back from the dead, Pavel had a lot of explaining to do.

She was the literary version of an apex predator, a preternaturally gifted grizzly bear, a crocodile genius.

It hadn't occurred to us to take him to the doctor, but it had occurred to us by then that Swedish was essentially a snake. He'd been bitten by a snake; he had survived; all we'd seen from him since were bizarre actions like this one. The door swung open, and the weresnake went in. As one again, as if bewitched, we followed.

Serbian and Swedish had experienced earthquakes, Slovenian a drought followed by multiple mutations of a bird flu that had done nothing to dampen her ornithological zeal but that had almost prevented her from being here with us. Out of compassion or so we believed-Irena had forbidden all talk about the weather several months before.

Lucy Newlinds

For all the relentlessness and sadism of human artifice that Irena addressed in Grey Eminence, wasn’t the suffering that existed in nature unbearable as well? And wasn’t it understandable that people tried to escape an endless cycle of oblivion and pain? 

“Nature survives only when it proves itself useful - to human beings. I mean; it is always useful to itself” 

In parts an interesting exploration of translation, writing, creativity, community and obsession. However, this didn’t grip me as much as I hoped it would given my interest in languages and translation, and having loved Jennifer Croft’s other novel, Homesick. The denouement at the end, however, was well done.

Supposed to be funny and clever and deep but never made it off the ground. Tedious, even though it includes many topics near to my heart. The characters are bland and indistinguishable from one another. The prose read like the worst kind of overwrought translated-into-English lit. That may have been on purpose, but it wasn't funny or enjoyable to read.

chicolini

The first 4/5's of the book feel like day and night are both dark, and I loved cozying up into the darkness. I found the world to be pretty confusing at the beginning but I just read along with my confusion at my side and enjoyed making sense as I went along.

The Extinction of Irena Rey

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