The Extinction of Irena Rey
NATIONAL BESTSELLER * NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY WALL STREET JOURNAL, ELLE, TOWN & COUNTRY, ELECTRIC LITERATURE, LIBRARY JOURNAL, CRIMEREADS, DOCUMENT JOURNAL, AND WORDS WITHOUT BORDERS * NAMED A MUST READ BY NPR, PEOPLE, VANITY FAIR, NYLON, ALTA JOURNAL, AND DEBUTIFUL
“Oh my mushrooms, The Extinction of Irena Rey is incredibly strange, savvy, sly and hard to classify. I also couldn't put it down.” -New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice)
From the International Booker Prize-winning translator and Women's Prize finalist, an utterly beguiling novel about eight translators and their search for a world-renowned author who goes missing in a primeval Polish forest.
Eight translators arrive at a house in a primeval Polish forest on the border of Belarus. It belongs to the world-renowned author Irena Rey, and they are there to translate her magnum opus, Grey Eminence. But within days of their arrival, Irena disappears without a trace.
The translators, who hail from eight different countries but share the same reverence for their beloved author, begin to investigate where she may have gone while proceeding with work on her masterpiece. They explore this ancient wooded refuge with its intoxicating slime molds and lichens and study her exotic belongings and layered texts for clues. But doing so reveals secrets-and deceptions-of Irena Rey's that they are utterly unprepared for. Forced to face their differences as they grow increasingly paranoid in this fever dream of isolation and obsession, soon the translators are tangled up in a web of rivalries and desire, threatening not only their work but the fate of their beloved author herself.
This hilarious, thought-provoking debut novel is a brilliant examination of art, celebrity, the natural world, and the power of language. It is an unforgettable, unputdownable adventure with a small but global cast of characters shaken by the shocks of love, destruction, and creation in one of Europe's last great wildernesses.
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Community Reviews
Clue to any future reader - make a cheat sheet with the 8 main characters' original names (the language they translate to) and their real names, with any other info you notice, like where they are from. Emilia/Spanish is the writer of the book originally and Alexis/English is the translator. The book they are all translating is written by Irena Rey and written in Polish.
I learned way too much about fungi and life cycles. Also parrots and beetles and honey hunting and lichen. I had a tough time imagining Irena's books being so successful as they were described, but I guess it's like when the sophisticated movie gets the Oscar and the one everyone actually watches gets bypassed. Her books sounded sophisticated and "meaningful."
So... all these people come together to translate her book into their languages, and she is acting strangely, then disappears. Poof! The cast follows her strict rules at first, but then divisions begin to show up. Irena has been idolized by her translators. Some of them come out of the spell and begin to behave as they want, others are still bound psychologically to do things exactly as Irena would have them do them. More than Irena herself disappears, the gang looks for clues, alliances and romances happen, as well as paranoia, enmity and a bit of psychosis.
The description on the front flap says it is hilarious and thought-provoking. Hilarious, not really. At least not to me. Odd, definitely. Engaging? Yes, I read it in 2 days. Thought-provoking? Yes, I'll definitely give it that. It's like going through a modern art museum. I like modern art, and I'll stand and ponder what emotions and thoughts a piece of art brings up in me. This is like that. Read it, make notes and exclamation marks in the margin if it's your own copy, and ponder it.
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