The History of Sound v. The Extinction of Irena Rey
The 2025 Tournament of Books, presented by Field Notes, is an annual battle royale among 16 of the best novels of the previous year.
MARCH 21 • QUARTERFINALS
The History of Sound
v. The Extinction of Irena Rey
Judged by Nicholas Glastonbury
Nicholas Glastonbury is a writer, translator, and editor from the Florida backwaters. His translations of Turkish and Kurdish fiction and poetry have appeared with or are forthcoming from Tilted Axis Press, Comma Press, Soho Press, Sandorf Passage, Nightboat Books, and elsewhere. He holds a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology and lives in New York. Known connections to this year’s contenders: None. / nglastonbury.com / Instagram
I don’t fuck with a forest. Where I’m from, you stay away from the woods. The land is often more liquid than solid, and death is everywhere: reptiles split open and teeming with flies; the delicate bones of small creatures, picked clean by scavengers and bleached by the sun; rabbits swallowed whole into the muck; the primordial soup of river deltas punctuated by the beady eyes of leering alligators; all to say nothing of the mosquitoes and other bloodsucking and hungry things intent on devouring you. Nothing survives the abattoir of the forest.
Unlike me, the characters in The History of Sound and The Extinction of Irena Rey fuck with forests big time. The Extinction of Irena Rey, by Jennifer Croft, is a fictional novel written in Polish by a fictional translator and translated into English by another fictional translator. Set mostly on the edge of Białowieża Forest, which straddles the border between Poland and Belarus, Extinction’s forest is haunted by a malevolent god named Leshy who kidnaps wanderers, and it is replete with mushrooms, lichens, trees with names, poisonous snakes, and birds of all kinds (including invasive parrots?).
And then there’s Ben Shattuck’s The History of Sound, opening with the title story in which one man revisits field recordings he made in the summer of 1919 with his lover throughout the “boreal wilderness” of New England. When these wax cylinders make their way to him, he ponders over all that was lost to time, finds himself longing for all that wasn’t and couldn’t have been recorded: “the vibrations that had been released into the world and never concentrated down the phonograph’s tube and to the stylus, that had never been impressed to wax.”
The History of Sound unspools from there in a sequence of stories that follow the structure of an 18th-century poetic form, the “hook-and-chain,” by means of which stories are paired to echo across time in the wilds of New England. An antique wooden dildo brings a man into possession of an 18th-century painting of a bird that looks “too modern.” Another bird hunted to extinction, the great auk, is seemingly brought back from the dead through one man’s devotion to his dying wife. Lost loves and loved ones appear and disappear out of the woods. Strange trees grow where they shouldn’t, in ways they shouldn’t. In each of these stories the wildernesses of New England become archives of wayward memory, indexing vanished social worlds whose logics cannot be ascertained from the objects that remain. As one character asks, “Who knows how these things end up where they do?”
The characters in The Extinction of Irena Rey likewise seek out something lost in the forest. Eight translators of the preeminent Polish writer Irena Rey, a shoo-in for the Nobel Prize, convene in the writer’s otherworldly mansion built in Białowieża Forest to translate her arcane magnum opus, Grey Eminence. Soon after their arrival, though, Irena Rey vanishes—perhaps kidnapped by Vladimir Putin, perhaps assassinated by the Polish government, or perhaps, simply, lost in the forest—and it becomes the task of the translators to find her. Did she vanish on purpose? Did she leave her translators clues in Grey Eminence, a novel about extinction, as a kind of performance art? Whatever the case may be, the forest looms over them, promising possible answers amidst its many dangers:
We’d come to understand the forest wasn’t a place that could be searched like any other place. It was a million unconnected events in the process of connecting, some advancing in time, some going backward. It was as many unentanglings, unpredictable and unstoppable.
Extinction is both fictionally written by and narrated from the perspective of Spanish translator Emi, one of the most unlikable protagonists I have read in some years. Emi is not just an unquestioning and sycophantic apostle of the cult of Irena Rey, whom she honorifically refers to as “Our Author” and imagines as a “centauric goddess whose words would staunch calamities.” She is also as driven by an unquenchable and jealous horniness for her hot Swedish counterpart Freddie as she is deeply vengeful toward and resentful of her hot American counterpart Alexis (who is the English translator of the novel we are reading) to the point of violence.
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Unlike Emi in Extinction, the characters in The History of Sound are often tragic and ineluctably sympathetic. Encountering these characters, wherever and whenever they are, is all the more palpable for how the form snarls them in time itself, letting their traces linger or vanish. “August in the Forest,” for instance, follows an aspiring writer trying to pursue answers about a mysterious incident that killed everyone at a logging camp more than a century ago. He visits the camp to write down “sensory details” about the place:
He wrote a small paragraph about seeing a chimney in the middle of the woods. Relic, he wrote. Tombstone. A monolith. He imagined the loggers sitting around this fireplace, their hair matted with sweat, their hands callused and marked with a few cuts. The acidic smell of wet socks, steaming warm, hanging from lines between the small bunks.
But the mystery that flickers in these details only comes into full view with the subsequent story, “The Journal of Thomas Thurber,” a vanished diary that chronicles life at the logging camp before its author meets his grisly end. Each story needs its untimely encounter to round out the story, to close the rhyme, to give the reader—if not its characters—the sense of a whole.
Still, I think The History of Sound sometimes misses the trees for the forest, if you will; it is too interested in its own formal conceit to complicate its protagonists more, too unwilling to fray its narrative threads. Extinction, by contrast, seduces you into its “tangled web of wanton violence.” I wasn’t always taken by its Sebaldian inclusion of Instagram posts from its narrator, but I loved this magic mushroom of a book. Its characters are raw in the caustic gaze of its vindictive narrator, becoming at turns “mycelial,” “lichenized,” standing between death and life. And, as the novel goes on, you come to realize that we are dealing not just with an unreliable author, but an unreliable translator too. Indeed, some of Extinction’s funniest moments come when Alexis trades barbs with Emi in her translator footnotes, cajoling you to trust nothing of the author:
“Here I have preserved her ridiculous word (Trans.).”
“Fuck you, Emilia Martini (Trans.).”
“?? (Trans.).”
“I doubt I scoffed (Trans.).”
Extinction is an invitation to feast on the malice of authorship like a fungus decomposing the dead. Here, in what Walter Benjamin might call the “high forest of language,” it’s the law of the jungle. Eat or be eaten.
Advancing:
The Extinction of Irena Rey
Match Commentary
with Meave Gallagher and Alana Mohamed
Alana Mohamed: Hello, Meave! It’s time to fuck with forests. How are we feeling about that? I think I might agree with Judge Glastonbury that forests are not my thing. That’s maybe why it took me a while to get into both of these books, but the forest he describes in his opening reminds me more of The Extinction of Irena Rey than The History of Sound. (Confession: I did not finish The History of Sound because my library copy was so overdue, I was starting to feel bad.)
Meave Gallagher: My dad got his associate’s degree in…forestry, I believe? He wanted to work for the National Forest Service. That dream didn’t work out, but he took us camping and hiking all over California—we used to camp for Thanksgiving, Alana—so I like a forest. Or at least a certain type of forest. Then again, some of my favorite scary stories are from Redditor searchandrescuewoods, which make me never want to go into a forest alone.
I have little experience with forests like the one the judge describes, but it sounds sticky and itchy, two of my least favorite feelings. The forests in The History of Sound seemed clean and pure and empty of history. Irena Rey’s forest, on the other hand, sounded much more like Judge Glastonbury’s, with “magic mushrooms” devouring the decomposing corpses of fauna and flora alike, the translators’ hallucinations and bizarre interpersonal dynamics. And Białowieża is the last piece of a 12,000-year-old forest, meaning it is definitely haunted.
Alana: I don’t think I have much skin in the game this match, but the decision did surprise me. Once Judge Glastonbury called Emi unlikable and the characters of The History of Sound “ineluctably sympathetic,” I thought, “Oh, it’s so over.” I was gearing up to defend the book. Then he beat me to it by praising Emi’s “caustic gaze” and recognizing the book as a battle of unreliable narrators. I was relieved to see that Irena Rey didn’t lose for its powerful narrator.
Meave: I didn’t know what to expect, but I had hopes. Irena Rey is so funny, and I love when it leans even harder into the ludicrous, with the extended puncturing of all the myths, and the museum lady seizing items literally under the translators’ feet, and that inexplicable denouement. With only Alexis’s “translator’s notes” to interrupt Emi’s fever dreams, it narrows the focus and distracts you from the reality the rest of the translators appear to be living in. Though they go a bit nuts, too, and that makes Emi seem even nuttier. I love the deranged version of her in the translation of her translation.
Alana: I kind of get what Judge Glastonbury means when he says Irena Rey forces readers to eat or be eaten—make meaning or be totally overcome—by the nuances of language. Both books have a kind of “lost in translation” theme built in, but it seems like the “hook-and-chain” form of The History of Sound really only demonstrated, for our judge, one lesson repeatedly—that meaning will be lost over time—versus Irena Rey’s translation conceit, which pitches readers headfirst into the confusion of that loss.
Meave: The History of Sound’s greatest strength, I thought, were the “sensory details” that it makes fun of the would-be writer for inventing: the scent of the apple orchards; pure forest snow; fresh air; the stink of a cabin full of unwashed loggers. Though I wonder if the collection would’ve worked better without having so many stories linked. Did I need to learn the secret of the great auk? Not really. Was it a sweet and tragic story? Yes, and it didn’t need the Radiolab prelude to interest me. I agree with the judge that the stories could’ve been a little messier, a little less neatly slotted into the diorama (snowglobe?) Shattuck built.
Alana: I do agree there was something…orderly? about the stories I read in The History of Sound. Or maybe a feeling of restraint, which feels very correct for its New England-ness. The colorful imagery the judge evokes suggests it is Irena Rey’s rawness that ultimately won him over. Did you think one conceit worked better than the other?
Meave: For sure. I’d characterize this judgment as a battle between variations on Ethan Frome in the style of J.S. Bach and The Rite of Spring—one crisp, beautiful apple eaten by different characters across time—and the Apple of Discord created by Irena Rey’s disappearance and the translators’ inevitable spiral into chaos.
Alana: The chaos is also funny! I went back and forth on whether Alexis’s insertions were fun or not, but I do remember when it dawned on me that she might be mis-translating or misrepresenting Emi in some way. That moment hit me like a ton of bricks.
Meave: I said this back when everyone was annoyed with Babel’s footnotes, but I love extratextual jokes. The point when you realize you can’t trust anyone, including Alexis and her entire translation of the book you are reading, was delicious. I became very invested in the layers of story, and was happy to accept the “invitation to feast on the malice of authorship.” Everyone is constantly crossing literal and metaphysical boundaries: The forest spreads over Poland and Belarus—though forests don’t care about states—the translators begin their transgressions by breaking one of Irena’s ironclad rules, and the next thing you know…well. Spoilers!
I can’t believe how much I remember from a book I read nearly a year ago. I appreciate a judgment that reminds me how much I liked a novel and why. Nice work, Judge Glastonbury.
Alana: You’re so right—I found a lot of the fungus talk trying in the beginning, but I remember so much of the book because I felt I had to be constantly on guard. Imagine if we read, say, the news or social media posts that way. After chatting, I’m more enthusiastic about this win. Excited to see how the Tournament progresses from here!
Meave: Thank you, Judge Glastonbury, for winning over another Irena Rey fan. And, point of personal privilege, I’ll recommend it as a mushroom-meaty book club choice.
Coming up Monday: Emily Hughes adjudicates between Liars and Margot’s Got Money Troubles, with two real-life husbands—Kevin and John—commentating.
Kevin Guilfoile: But before we leave you this week, here’s another Zombie update! The History of Sound will not hear the voodoo princess calling it back to life. If the Zombie Round were held today, All Fours and Beautyland would be our bookish bogeypeople.
Today’s mascot
Nominated by Danielle, Daisy is a beagle/terrier mix and has the energy to prove it! Only three years old, Daisy is still very much in puppy mode—she likes long walks around the neighborhood, meeting up with her friends at the dog park and pulling the stuffing out of every toy that crosses her path.
When she isn’t keeping an eye out for visitors at the window, she spends her time chasing the sun spots both in and out of the house. While not an avid reader (she prefers running and leaping for her frisbee), Daisy would love the opportunity to chase the live rooster awarded to this year’s winner.
If you’re interested in nominating a pet as a mascot for this year’s Tournament of Books, contact us for more details. (Please note, this is a paid program.)