Jennifer Croft is a translator of uncommon energy. In 2018 she won the International Booker Prize for her rendering of Flights by Olga Tokarczuk. In 2021, she took on Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob, a great big historical epic. Now she’s written a satirical page-turner set over what one character calls ‘seven toxic, harrowing, oddly arousing, extremely fruitful weeks’.

Like members of some ancient mystery cult, eight translators fetch up in a house near a primeval forest in Poland on the Belarus border. The year is 2017. ‘Bedraggled and ecstatic’, they’ve come to translate Szara eminencja (Grey Eminence), a novel about art and mass extinction, by the Stockholm-worthy woman of letters Irena Rey – their host, their author, their Athena. Yet while they are soaking up Irena’s reflected glory, she disappears, possibly into the forest. They hasten to find her and go a bit mad; before long, their search assumes the darker character of a moral reckoning.

The book purports to have issued from two of Irena’s translators: an Argentine named Emi, who originally wrote it in Spanish-inflected Polish (each sentence ‘a tiny haunted house’ aswarm with the ghosts of her native language) and Emi’s put-upon American nemesis, Alexis, the blonde stunner tasked with translating it into English. Alexis is also the intellectual traducer in this truth-y account of metaphorical murder and mayhem, ‘the monster who seemed to want to ruin everything’.

In the beginning, the textually-loyalist Emi accuses the venturesome Alexis of violating their ‘sacred translation honour code’. By giving Alexis a double role, not to mention all the best lines and unlimited footnotes, Croft neatly undermines the narrator’s authority while making sport of the old chestnut that the best translator is an invisible one.

For all its cleverness, The Extinction of Irena Rey is serious about the collective nature of art-making and its interconnectedness with the natural world. What is more, Croft is superb on approaches to literary translation and its orthodoxies (Nabokov hovers at the edges of the text) and she takes some good shots at the cult of the upper-case author into the bargain.

Lazy, mean-minded readers may wonder if there isn’t a hint of Olga Tokarczuk in Croft’s Rey. The answer is no, if you believe the acknowledgements, though Croft does trace her interest in translation ‘communities’ to Tokarczuk.

Early on, Emi describes their translation community as ‘a family’. But as another Polish literary genius, Czeslaw Milosz, famously observed: ‘When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.’ Once uncoupled from Irena, Emi wonders who she is without her. The book’s metafictional playfulness and tricky ending suggest at least one possible answer. She’s a faithful translator whose metamorphosis into a writer of comic brilliance features in a novel by the (fictitious) 2026 Nobel Laureate Irena Rey.