Mushrooms + Myopia
“Maybe we’d been searching for the wrong Irena.”
In Białowieża, one of the last surviving areas of European primeval forest, a team of translators gathers in the fantastical home of world-shaking author Irena Rey. Their mission is to render her latest novel, Szara eminencja, into their respective languages. But Irena doesn’t give them the manuscript. She takes them into the trees, gifts them amadou—a fire-starter made from mushrooms—and shares with them her anxieties about the forest’s future. Soon after, she disappears.
Behind the bold, lemonade text and the psychedelic blue trees on the cover of Jennifer Croft’s The Extinction of Irena Rey, a leafy figure reclines in a sensual pose. This is the novel: attention-bewildering, eco-terror atmospheric, and hilarious.
Cosmic mysteries are all about what happens when unworldly forces breach the everyday, when the investigator trespasses into the unknown for answers. The way the investigator sees the world can make or break a cosmic mystery: the way they pay attention to what’s around them, and the way they think about what’s within them. In Extinction, you’re not dealing with one perspective, or even two, but several hopelessly tangled with each other.
After Irena disappears, Emi feels “like we’d each started writing our own story about Irena now, each in the genre that suited us best. Alexis was writing a mystery novel… I wondered what kind of story mine would be.”
Alexis is Extinction’s fictional translator, and perhaps without her, this wouldn’t be a mystery. Spoilers below, but I’m inclined to note that this isn’t the kind of book where knowing what happens has any effect on the reading experience.
Alexis is the basis for a primary character, and she does not like the way she is portrayed. She doesn’t like a lot of the author’s choices: the tone, resulting from the author’s use of Polish, the implication that they are both guilty of a crime worth extradition, the author’s chosen title vis-à-vis Irena Rey’s focus on climate disaster.
(Read this ‘warning’ again, after finishing the book, and you’ll have that exact feeling you get when you realize your clever friend who always has something funny to say about someone else is maybe just mean, and possibly also a little dumb.)
Alexis indulges early in a few little footnotes that correct to her version of events while making fun of the author. But they’re a trick: just because she’s setting the record straight in the footnotes doesn’t mean she isn’t also taking huge creative liberties with the main text, possibly omitting entire scenes for the sake of personal or publication goals. Alexis is a twist on the unreliable narrator: the unreliable translator.
Information gets lost and changed between every layer:
1. The Extinction of Irena Rey, written by Jennifer Croft (here, ‘A Novel’ feels like a sort of non-Euclidean Fargo disclaimer)
2. The Extinction of Irena Rey, a novel, translation of Amadou into English by Alexis
3. Amadou, a novel, written in Polish by Emi, who translates Irena Rey’s Polish into Argentinian Spanish
4. Szara eminencja/Éminence grise/Grey Eminence/etc., written by Irena Rey, translated by most of the other characters
5. Real life people and events that Irena Rey exploits for inspiration
This book is about two books, and there are two mysteries: where is Irena Rey, and WHAT is Emi’s problem with Alexis?
Some cosmic mysteries feature protagonists led by an atypical compass, and some cosmic mysteries involve a great, mysterious work of art by a great, mysterious creator. (Last month I talked about why this is so effective, at the halfway point.)
In Irena Rey, Emi has both. Irena Rey is Emi’s religion, and Emi assumes the other translators share in her fervency. To be fair, it does sound like a little bit of a cult: Emi cannot freely talk to Irena, and inside the house, the translators refer to each other by their languages. She mourns the first conversation that doesn’t somehow involve Irena, and they construct a shrine in her absence that’s only maybe tongue-in-cheek.
Because Emi worships the ground Irena Rey walks on, her obsession with Alexis manifests as an odd side effect of translation—Alexis translates Irena Rey and is therefore touched by her godliness (this desire-once-removed is also how Emi ends up sleeping with the Swedish translator, Freddie). There’s something of a ‘you’re so pretty I hate you’ thing going on, a sore spot for Alexis given her troubled past with the US beauty pageant circuit. There’s also, clearly and distinctly, an important difference in opinion on what it means to be a translator. There’s a lot to be said about what it means, socially and economically, that Alexis is the American English translator. Emi’s priority is faithfulness to Irena, and Alexis’ priority is the imagined English reader’s enjoyment.
(Does something complicated and sexual happen between the two of them that only fuels this feud? Yes.)
The translators choose to begin their work in Irena Rey’s absence. Thereafter, Emi appears to spend as much mental energy blaming Alexis for everything that goes wrong as she does on the matter of the missing Irena Rey. I often found myself wanting to scream, The person you idolize has disappeared under weird circumstances! You’re in a potentially cosmic mystery! Please focus! (Which, for me at least, seemed an intentional stand-in for climate anxiety.)
Emi’s grudges and anxieties are a nice reflection on the stylized idiosyncrasies of other cosmic investigators, like cool hunter Cayce Pollard from William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition (with Sara Gran’s self-destructive Claire DeWitt somewhere between the two). This makes Emi’s perspective a doubled-edged sword.
Because she is so easily distracted, there are long sections of the book where, considering the atmosphere, I thought there could be a full-on Annihilation scenario happening and she wouldn’t notice. And because she is so easily discredited, any considerations she might have toward the cosmic sound like she’s maybe losing the plot. How much of that is Emi’s authorly effort to capture the uncanny nature of her months in Białowieża? How much is Alexis’ interference?
Because Emi does turn to the cosmic, in the ‘gods are among us’ sense of the word (and not just in her worship of Irena). Emi and the others encounter a park ranger named Leszek, who later claims to be an old friend of Irena’s. His appearance reminds the others of Leshy, a Slavic forest deity who can transform into anything but has a few characteristics in a more human form. Among them, swapped shoes.
Emi, due to language difference or gullibility, believes for a moment they are saying the ranger was actually Leshy. Later, she theorizes, if a little wildly, that the ‘Irena’ they met this time around seemed off, and was perhaps Leshy in disguise. At various points she also wonders if animals around her are Leshy or Leszek.
As things progress, Emi talks more to the ranger. Once, in conversation, she sees someone reminiscent of the protagonist from Grey Eminence, and immediately theorizes that Irena had written such a compelling character that it manifested in reality. It doesn’t occur to her that Irena might have gotten inspired by a neighbor. Later, Emi asks this ranger why one of the translators is being visited by ghosts.
He says it is “because of the logging. Cutting down the trees releases carbon… thousands of years ago, human beings cut down the forests because they didn’t feel safe in them… but cutting down the trees releases our worst nightmares into the atmosphere. This is a far more terrifying situation than before because now there is nowhere to hide.”
Of course, he carries a bag made from the amadou mushroom. Amadou, or hubka, seems to be the key to something, with how often it or its source mushroom Fomes fomentarius keeps showing up. Emi is confused about what amadou is, but that’s not entirely her fault—Spanish Wikipedia apparently doesn’t have an entry for it, and the people around her aren’t quick to make things clear, possibly because they have difficulty explaining it in Polish, their agreed-upon shared tongue for these translation summits.
Other mushrooms appear throughout. Freddie is bitten by a snake while trying to show the others a different species, and for a bit, they believe they may have poisoned Irena by serving her inky caps. Fungi (and associated mycelial networks and cordyceps) have done great things for horror. In this case, the mushroom heralds the cosmic in that Irena’s gift of amadou gains the gravity of prophecy in hindsight. Amadou is a fire-starting material, and the translators burn down Irena’s house after her death.
Emi also thinks that they might find Irena via social media, a hint that Emi knows Irena’s human side better than she thinks. She makes a new account with some hyperlocal photos, and eventually, Emi sees an oblique post from one of the accounts she thinks belongs to Irena. Oddly, she wants to keep it to herself, because this clue is solely the product of her labor, unlike the group translation effort.
Last Time On Cosmic Mystery Club, I talked about someone falling out of love with a text because they became disillusioned and unconvinced by its mystery. Emi’s Irena Rey worship eventually shifts, too. It’s hard to live out of someone’s house without encountering the signs of their humanity: expensive face creams, diet pills, insipid self-help books. This is not the magnetic force Emi has devoted herself to. Which Irena would Emi like to find?
One pistol duel later, Emi’s hatred for Alexis seems to resolve and fade. Then Emi discovers the secret files that Irena Rey keeps on all her translators. She learns that Irena chose her translators not because she thought of them as worthy messengers of her work, but because each had such tragic backstories that Irena wanted to get close to them, to mine them for inspiration for her next novel, The Translators. Emi learns that Irena has the least material on her because, to Irena, she is a bit of a joke, a “semi-soulless follower”.
(A conclusion that the reader may, unfortunately, share… which makes me wonder if Emi is really this way, or if she wrote herself to better reflect this perception of her for the sake of the story—though there’s also Alexis’ HGTV renovation-style translating to consider.)
This betrayal, I think, is a large portion of why Alexis translates the fictional Amadou/Extinction the way she does. With the tragedies of her real life mined for inspiration by Irena, she’s not keen to allow Emi unfettered creative freedom. I would love to know what Amadou/Extinction would be marketed as—in Poland and Europe, in Argentina, and in the translator’s home market, the United States of America. Literary novel? Auto-fiction? Magical realist memoir?
While this discovery makes it seem like one of those cases where the source of the cosmic was human strangeness all along, the glorious Irena that Emi worships makes one final appearance.
Emi tells the others about this betrayal, and about the Instagram account. They track Irena to Tempelhof, a location eight hours away. Tempelhof is the ‘exact opposite of Białowieża’—a location that has undergone many cycles of human use, among them a concentration camp, airport, public park.
Inside, they find an altar-like stash containing all the personal possessions that had vanished in the months following Irena’s disappearance, along with some of Irena’s. Whatever gathered these items, it had been in Irena’s house with them the whole time, and perhaps with Irena, even longer.
They pursue Irena onto the roof, where Emi and Alexis together confront their author about The Translators. Emi notes that Irena appears to be wearing her boots on the wrong feet. “The woman we had worshipped looked almost clownish now.” Irena dies when they push her off the roof.
(Leszek is never mentioned again, though maybe he was just irrelevant from that point forward.)
In the moment, it might be easy to think that Emi is so caught up in this betrayal that she’s incapable of seeing this godly presence for what it is. And maybe that’s true. In the moment.
What happened here? Are the references to Leshy just some metaphorical conceit? Was Leshy masquerading as a long-gone Irena? Or Did Emi get it right that their Irena was a god, and was so consumed with her own conception of Irena that she never asked which one?
What does Alexis believe? She’s the one who decided to change the title from the literary Amadou to the weird thriller The Extinction of Irena Rey, to better reflect the climate anxiety that marked Irena’s last decade of life. Is this title how Alexis perceived these shared events, some last laugh, making Emi seem so obtuse that she couldn’t recognize the cosmic standing before her?
Emi, the author, wrote Amadou/Extinction. It went through all the stages of writing a novel. Emi, the author, purposely noted the signs by which one could recognize Leshy, and Emi, the author, presumably wrote this line (helped or hindered by Alexis). The key deduction in this mystery is that the whim-driven character Emi is the creation of a more self-aware woman.
What remains, then, is the feeling that we are missing something. The necessary clues are waiting, beyond the twin veils of fictionalization-within-fiction and translation, which separate the book-about-a-book we read from the world in which the species known as Irena Rey became extinct.
NEXT MONTH
Thank you, everyone, for your continued curiosity in this weird genre experiment. If you haven’t already, please subscribe, and if someone you know also loves strange mysteries, please let them know they’re very welcome here at the Cosmic Mystery Club.
Next month we’re taking a break from books-with-books and venturing into the glittering refineries and petro-wasted suburbs of Louisiana in Geography of Robots’ award-winning point-and-click game Norco. We’ll track down a missing brother, do some gig work on a weird bird app, dive into the ghost bayous, and consider what gets left for the future when people feel like there is no future unless they leave. See you then.