Jennifer Croft

The Extinction of Irena Rey

Lucy Newlinds

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

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? 

Laura Dobie

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.

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.

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

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.

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

The Extinction of Irena Rey quotes

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