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Summary
Summary
National Indie Bestseller
Named a must read by People, Vanity Fair , Electric Literature , Nylon , Alta Journal , CrimeReads and Debutiful
Named a most anticipated book by Elle, The Millions , Bustle , Lit Hub , Dandelion Chandelier , Zibby Mag , Bookpage , and The Rumpus
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, Gray 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.
Author Notes
Jennifer Croft won a Guggenheim Fellowship for this novel, the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing for her memoir Homesick, and the International Booker Prize for her translation of Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk's Flights. She is the translator of Federico Falco's A Perfect Cemetery , Romina Paula's August , Pedro Mairal's The Woman from Uruguay , and Olga Tokarczuk's The Books of Jacob . She has also received the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. She lives in Tulsa and Los Angeles.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Translator and memoirist Croft (Homesick) serves up a wickedly funny mystery involving an internationally famous author and her translators. It's 2017 and narrator Emi, who hails from Buenos Aires, is one of eight translators visiting celebrated Polish novelist Irena Ray's house in the ancient Białowieża forest. This is the translators' seventh "pilgrimage" to Białowieża, where they've gathered to put Irena's latest tome into their respective languages. All of them worship Irena, whom Emi calls "Our Lady of Literature," with hilariously slavish devotion. When Irena disappears, so does their collective sanity, and thus begins a twisty detective story. Efforts to track down Irena are interspersed with various "bizarre actions" involving snakes, mythological Slavic creatures, archers, patriots, and attempted murder. Each of the perils is absurdly entertaining in its own way, and the endangered forest's fungi capture Emi's imagination and provide Croft with a magical and metaphor-rich backdrop. Emi's relationships with her colleagues, who are nicknamed for the languages they're translating Irena's novel into, further enliven the narrative as it reaches a poignant denouement. The novel's greatest strength, however, lies in Croft's energetic set pieces, demonstrated most mirthfully in the "catfight" that takes place between Emi and "English," whose footnotes provide her with a juicy opportunity for revenge. This is a blast. Agent: Katie Grimm, Don Congdon Assoc. (Mar.)
Guardian Review
"Translators are like ninjas," the Israeli author Etgar Keret wrote in 2017. "If you notice them, they're no good." The literary translation community must have felt delighted at this upgrade to their image: no longer dictionary dorks, but lithe, black-clad assassins! The thrilling story of ninja translators is yet to be told, but Jennifer Croft, an eminent translator whose English version of Olga Tokarczuk's Flights won the International Booker prize in 2018, has put her own spin on the profession with this ambitious, fecund novel, her second after the autofictional Homesick (published in Spanish in 2014, then in English in 2019). Croft has been fascinated by translation since she was a child, and this novel is a deep dive into the complexities and ambiguities of the role. A translator's job is to render the original as faithfully as possible, yet they are also creating a new work of their own with every word they type. It's an artistic paradox, the kind that can't be represented straightforwardly in fiction. It needs something special - and Croft does not disappoint. The book's narrator is a translator, one of eight who gather periodically at the home of Irena Rey, a critically acclaimed Polish novelist, to write versions of her latest book in their mother tongues. They are so bound up by their work that they refer to each other by their languages, rather than names. Our narrator is called Spanish and she uses the collective "we" liberally, speaking for the group, especially with reference to Rey, whom they revere: "We were all in love with her." Spanish wants us to think the translators are of one mind, like a Greek chorus. Reading a translator translating a translator can't fail to change the way you think about language There's a twist, though: the text we are reading, written by Spanish, has itself been translated by another of the eight, English - and Spanish and English do not get along. English makes it clear, in her prefatory Note from the Translator, that she has her suspicions about Spanish's version of events, and has "corrected" a few things as she went along. So we are faced with a (possibly) unreliable narrator, translated by a (possibly) unreliable translator. It's a hall of mirrors worthy of Nabokov, and indeed, there are echoes of his great work Pale Fire in the snide, funny footnotes English scatters through the text ("Here I have preserved her ridiculous word"). Upon this complex scaffolding Croft hangs a vivid story about what happens to the eight translators when Rey goes missing, leaving them alone in her house on the edge of Poland's Bia?owie?a forest, a primal wilderness teeming with life. They search for her in its mossy undergrowth, but find only fungi - a central metaphor of the book, for what are translators if not symbionts, perhaps even parasites, using the raw materials of someone else's creativity to produce a florescence of their own? The group are lost until an email arrives with the text of Rey's new novel, ready for translation, at which point they learn each other's names and Spanish's "we" falls away as each begins to assert their own identity. Drama ensues, secrets are spilt, characters couple up and the search for Rey becomes increasingly bizarre and unpredictable. There's a lot going on here; indeed, the book resembles Bia?owie?a forest in its wild and fertile proliferation of ideas. Croft just about manages to keep it all together, although her fondness for themes and metaphors comes at the expense of character development. The warring English and Spanish are a marvellous double act, but others who could also have been interesting (Serbian and Slovenian, for instance) are neglected. And the ending, which unites the group once more, falls a little flat after the intense 300-page buildup that has gone before. But it is to Croft's credit that she sustains her claustrophobic narrative so deftly, with plenty of plot twists. What ultimately makes this book such a pleasure, though, is the uniqueness of its perspective. Reading a translator translating a translator is a brain-twister like no other, and it can't fail to change the way you think about language. It feels like a privilege, too, to appreciate the passages that seem to have been written specifically to amuse her colleagues. Notably English's version of a work by a Polish poet deemed untranslatable, which runs: "The world persists, but insecurely! / The rustling trees grow ultratreely!" You can picture translators gleefully texting it to each other with laughing-face emojis. It's a glimpse into a profession that serves as a fascinating metaphor for our parasitic, multilingual, creatively prolific world.
Kirkus Review
An acclaimed author disappears, leaving her translators to fend for themselves. When eight translators arrive at the home of a renowned author in a remote Polish village, they expect to be put to work translating her latest title--her masterpiece!--into each of the eight languages they not only represent but also call each other in lieu of actual names. There's English, of course, but also German, Ukrainian, the inseparable Serbian and Slovenian, Spanish--who's narrating this novel-about-a-novel--French, and so on. Needless to say, things don't go as planned. To start, within a day or two, and without notice, the renowned author goes missing. Not long after, the translators, who've maintained a cultlike devotion to "Our Author," begin developing habits of their own--like discussing the weather, drinking alcohol, and eating meat, all previously forbidden--and even referring to each other by name. Croft, a renowned translator in her own right (of Olga Tokarczuk, among others), makes for a wickedly funny satirist when it comes to some of the more obsequious behaviors involved in the translator-author relationship. At the same time--even in the midst of a joke--she writes profoundly about the philosophical stakes of translation. "Translation isn't reading," she writes. "Translation is being forced to write a book again." Near the author's house is the Białowieża Forest, which plays as central a role as any of the human characters. Climate change, myth, and fungi are stirred into the mix as well, which certainly makes for an interesting canvas, if not an entirely successful one. Though her insights tend to inspire wonder, Croft's storytelling can occasionally drag, and she sometimes seems to lose track of her characters, not all of whom feel fully fledged. A striking if imperfect novel about language, the earth, and what it means to make art. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Searching for their beloved author in deep Polish woods, a coterie of translators confront an ambiguous text and the perception-distorting realities of imminent environmental collapse. Eight sophisticated literary translators, initially identified only by their respective target languages, convene at a remote cabin near the Belarussian border to collaborate on reverent translations of a major new work by Irena Rey. But something seems off with the world-renowned novelist, and when she disappears, perhaps into the vast Białowieża forest or perhaps into some other life-form altogether, the group searches for clues and descends into disarray. Could Grey Eminence, Rey's masterpiece, really suggest that our current extinction event is a consequence of humanity's need to create, to transform our world to give it meaning? Is it possible that the whole scenario is an elaborate performance piece? Croft, herself an acclaimed literary translator (of Polish Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk, among others) both celebrates and lampoons translation communities, which being both altruistic and parasitic, resemble the complex dynamics of forest biomes. Editorial footnotes, provided by the narrator's own supposed translator, are delightfully wry. But beneath the satire and the metafiction lie a lament for our all-too-real ongoing ecocide and a desperate appeal that humans might emulate fungi and find sustenance within the destruction.
