The Extinction of Irena Rey v. James
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 28 • ZOMBIE ROUND
The Extinction of Irena Rey
v. James
Judged by Mary Turfah
Mary Turfah is a writer and surgical resident trained in anthropology at Yale and Middle Eastern South Asian and African Studies at Columbia, where her research focused on trauma memory and the margins of the Nakba. Known connections to this year’s contenders: None. / maryturfah.com
What informs my judgment: The majority of the media I consume these days concerns geopolitics. Since the start of the genocide in Gaza, most my time not spent at work (which almost feels like a distraction) goes to Palestine and to Lebanon. The idea of “escaping” into a book while people, my people, are struggling to escape bombardment, confronting the rubble of their homes, confronting soldiers there to kill their sons and fathers, their mothers, occupy their land, feels irresponsible. As I’m not caught up in the act of survival I have more responsibility to do something, to figure out what this something can look like, as avenues for meaningful action in this country seem to shrink every day.
I want to believe that immersion isn’t the same thing as escape—and still I’ve had a hard time reading books how I used to. Where before I could relax into a novel, I no longer have that ease and doubt I’ll have it again. Honestly? A book takes an investment of time, and I’m OK with needing the text to convince me that it gets it, at least on some level, before I let it in, or let myself into it.
I’m still trying to read fiction. The thing with fiction though is that I’m choosing to step into a world beyond mine, and if I’m going to do this even as a form of let’s say, immersive rest, I need to feel like I’m emerging better equipped to recognize the world I’m in.
I think the Rule, as I’ve heard it, is that we’re not supposed to mine fiction for moral lessons, that good fiction is a function of the totality of the immersion it grants you. What about both/and, where I need a narrator grappling with moral questions, someway somehow, to get their POV. Now, I’ll admit that there aren’t a lot of narrators whose voices synapse onto my readerly sensibilities. And, I’m getting pinged with news, after which it’s easy for a book, about most things, to feel harder to get back into. Here I’ll say that it helps when a book has a low threshold for entry. There are books that make it easy for the reader to jump right in and others that make you, the reader, work harder, often because the author is doing a lot—not in a bad way, and often beautifully—with language and imagery to envelop you in their world, prohibitive when I don’t have as much time or mental bandwidth to sit with a text for long before I get a breaking news update or a work message or a call, or I fall asleep.
For the books: The Extinction of Irena Rey and James.
The Extinction of Irena Rey by Jennifer Croft opens with a letter from its translator, and I initially thought it was a disclaimer from Croft-as-Croft, rather than part of the story. Once I was properly oriented I recognized something was afoot. The book itself and its narration of a series of events, we understand, is a translation. A devoted collection of translators—initially identified not by their names but by the languages each of them translates into, and one of whom is Extinction’s original narrator (Spanish), another of whom is its translator (English)—has arrived at the home of a famous Polish author (Irena, also reverentially called “Our Author”) whose work they are to, well, translate, and with whom they’ve worked on many books, all widely celebrated. The book they’re to work on now will of course be bigger, better, than its predecessors. Here The Extinction of Irena Rey pokes fun at the translators’ devotion:
As we had taken our places around our table on the third floor of her home, Irena at its head, presiding, Bogdan had placed a spiral-bound copy of her new manuscript before each of us in turn….First, she would divulge the title of her latest work. Then she would wait a little for the title to sink in, and we would marvel over it. Then she would read us the first paragraph….She wanted us to translate fresh, uninfluenced by any reviews or propaganda we might read, whether for her or against her. She refused to send her manuscripts to her editor, now at the largest publisher in Poland, until our translations had passed the halfway mark. This meant that Our Author did not write rough drafts, only final ones, and that gave her work an appealing unevenness, akin to the oak bark behind her, that other literary figures’ slicker coproductions lacked.
Their unquestioning awe of Their Author leads them to miss signs until, oh no! She is missing! Where did she go? As the translators try, in their own absurd ways, to find her, they trip over themselves and the tree roots encircling her wild estate.
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Many of the sentences are great. Like this string of them:
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. It was all time condensed into a moment at once fleeting and so unfathomably vast that if a person wished to disappear in it, there would never be anything anyone could do to recover her.
And funny, and poke fun at exactly the sort of self-bubbling I find myself pushing back against. The sentences that immediately follow those quoted above:
Unless, of course, she’d never been there in the first place. But none of that could have occurred to us that morning. We were book people. We had yet to truly concern ourselves with earth.
Percival Everett’s James reimagines The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the point of view of Mark Twain’s Jim, who for Everett goes by James. Among the first correctives James offers is this: What he calls the “slave filter” was used by Black people to make white people feel better, and in turn to protect the former from the latter. As such, it’s something James helps the next generation master:
The children said together, “And the better they feel, the safer we are.”
“February, translate that,” [James said to February]
“Da mo’ betta dey feels, da mo’ safer we be.”
“Nice.”
Several chapters after James’s escape, he returns to the enslaver Judge Thatcher’s house, armed with a pistol, to ask some questions (I won’t spoil the story). Thatcher finds James there and, confronted with a loaded gun, agrees to supply answers. James needs directions; he opens a map and instructs the white man to show him where they are and where James needs to go. The place, Edina, isn’t on the map. James asks why and Thatcher asks, “You can read?” and James pretends to ignore his disbelief and instead repeats his question. “Are you going to kill me?” Thatcher asks a few lines down their exchange. “The thought crossed my mind. I haven’t decided. Oh, sorry, let me translate that for you. I ain’t ’cided, Massa,” James answers. Then, facing inward and the reader,
I had never seen a white man filled with such fear. The remarkable truth, however, was that it was not the pistol, but my language, the fact that I didn’t conform to his expectations, that I could read, that had so disturbed and frightened him.
James is a masterful balance of this back and forth between inside and outside, between self and other. James the character is the perfect sieve, we are with him all the way, as he lives with Huck, as they steer their raft and the novel’s plot, as he grows into himself and leads Huck to do the same. It’s said that the oppressed know their oppressor better than the latter can know themselves, often because to impose such conditions as enslavement or colonization on other people requires a relinquishing of one’s own self-awareness, enmeshed as this necessarily is with how other people see you. Through James we see a world, expansive, opposite that captured through the white gaze, a world exactly through what it can’t, or won’t, recognize about itself.
Where Extinction’s sentences wind and cascade, those in James feel sharp, tense almost. James wields language with less ease than does Extinction’s translator, which of course makes sense: A translator plays with, trades in words for a living; James learns over the course of the story that an enslaved man who’d stolen a pencil on his behalf was lynched for it. Toward the end of James, our narrator confronts men responsible for his people’s enslavement, and here I found James’s matter-of-factness in describing his acts of retribution refreshing: Something had to be done, a decision was made, and there wasn’t much else to say.
Over the last many months, living in the country responsible for the death and destruction of my people, I’ve been thinking a lot about navigating worlds in which we do and don’t recognize ourselves, and the power and limits of language. After reading these books I visited the internet to see what other people had to say. I came across Reddit posts condemning the scenes of violence in James for ruining an otherwise good book. Only then did I realize that there were readers who struggled to see themselves in James. I’ve been thinking about this too, who can and can’t intuit a certain perspective, which is another way of wondering who counts and doesn’t, and to whom, as human.
Advancing:
James
Match Commentary
with Kevin Guilfoile and John Warner
Kevin Guilfoile: Reading is a time-intensive activity, as Judge Turfah points out, and life intrudes. It’s not just that we are all busy doing other things, but the chaos and stress and even horrors of the world can make reading seem superfluous. In an earlier round, we touched on the fact that the decline in reading fiction seems to coincide with an overall decline in empathy.
Judge Turfah recently wrote a piece for the Baffler in which she scrolls through the social media feeds of Israeli soldiers in Gaza. It is hard to read, but I recommend you do it. We are living through a time when it feels like entire cultures, entire countries, are forgetting what it means to be human.
John Warner: In the newsletter installment I published in the early aftermath of the re-election of Donald Trump I declared, “Unlike the first Trump administration, I intend to be vigilant, but not hyper vigilant. There’s spectacle, and then there’s things that matter, and the vast majority of the coverage of what he’s up to is spectacle.”
My intention was to focus on things that brought some measure of intellectual and emotional nourishment, things like reading, but increasingly these things do seem superfluous and that there is a kind of obligation to pay attention to the unbelievable destruction that authoritarian and fascist powers are wreaking across the globe. We (speaking of Americans) don’t have a lot of firsthand experience with this, which is why reading things like judge Turfah’s piece you link to is important. I think it would be limiting to reduce James to an attempt to empathize with the titular character, but part of Everett’s project is clearly to force us to see the character and the character’s place in Twain’s original, differently.
Judge Turfah ultimately rules for James because of its power to get us (though not all of us) to see differently.
Kevin: I sat down for a quick lunch in front of the TV the other day and, seeking refuge from the news, landed on the Game Show Network hoping for a Jeopardy!, or even a Gene Rayburn-era Match Game. Instead I found a light trivia game show called Switch. The first question I saw was this:
Ralph Ellison did write Invisible Man in 1952, and you could write a passable undergraduate paper on the ways in which it might be considered a “scary story.” But it is clear that the writer of that question does not know the difference between Ellison’s Invisible Man and HG Wells’s The Invisible Man, written more than 50 years earlier.
John: We should pause to note the look on Kenneth’s face, which is some combination of WTF?/OMG! and FU!
Kevin: Oh my god, I didn’t notice that until you pointed it out.
It’s just a minor league game show and this is probably the result of somebody letting AI do their work for them. But it’s a symptom of our cultural illiteracy that no fact-checker on the show caught it. No producer stopped it from airing. The host read the question and found nothing amiss. The contestant gave the “correct” answer, insomuch as that was the only Ralph Ellison novel published in 1952, but he didn’t catch the mistake. Also I was watching at noon on a weekday. I don’t know when each episode of Switch airs originally, or even how many years it’s been since this episode first appeared. This error had to pass the eyes of literally hundreds of people at the show and network. Nobody involved with this program has noticed this? Or maybe they don’t care.
John: Bingo on that last bit.
Kevin: James is a novel very much about our humanity, and its insights are more penetrating to a reader with some familiarity with the original novel. I fear we are rapidly approaching a day when few people in our non-reading culture will understand the difference between Twain’s Jim and Everett’s James. Or maybe they just won’t care.
John: You’re talking about a kind of deep cultural literacy about texts we find of value, but it’s entirely possible, maybe even probable that we are in the midst of a larger shift away from printed texts/words to the dominance of video and as a throwback to pre-print culture, audio (in the form of podcasts). The worry, from my perspective, is that all of this stuff becomes a kind of stimuli wallpaper, just stuff that captures our gaze in the direction we’re looking in. It requires no thought, no engagement, and engenders few thoughts in our heads when we’re experiencing it. This is the kind of shift I warn against in my new book, but it’s possible that there’s nothing we can really do about it.
Kevin: Helplessness is the vibe of our era. I hate cynicism, so I have to be confident it won’t always be so.
Well, that was as much of a bummer as any Rooster commentary you and I have written in 20 years, and we started doing this shit in the Bush administration. So, as you suggest, let’s turn our attention to something that’s going to nourish us, namely, the ToB championship!
Andrew Womack: Martyr! has been tearing through the competition and on Monday it will face a rematch versus 2024 literary favorite James with all 17 judges serving as our jury. As always we invite readers to predict which book will triumph, as well as the final tally. (For instance, Martyr! 9–8 or James 10–7, etc.)
However, unlike previous years where people only dropped their guesses into the comments, this time we ask you to submit your predictions using the form below. We’ll randomly select two lucky winners from the correct entries to receive a year-long subscription to Field Notes, and we’ll announce them on Monday. (Feel free to also share your predictions with the Commentariat! However, only those entered in the form will be eligible to win subscriptions.)
This poll is now closed. Thank you to everyone who voted!
And if you enjoy filling out forms, have we got news for you. As many of you may recall, last year the Commentariat inaugurated—and named—our people’s choice award, the Henhouse. And which book wins is up to you. Maybe it’s the book that won the Rooster, maybe it’s the book that should have won—either way, please use this form to cast your vote. Same as above, feel free to share your choice in the comments as well, campaign for it, etc.
This poll is now closed. Thank you to everyone who voted!
Today’s mascot
Welcome today’s mascot Nora, nominated by McKenzie, who tells us:
Nora was rescued from an apartment parking lot, and is a very vocal dictator within the household. She demands laps, food, belly rubs, and strict adherence to the daily routine.
Depending on where we are within said routine, she either loves books because they mean a lap will be available for a long period of time, or sits on the books to ensure our attention is paid to her instead. Nora wouldn’t have a favorite book in the Tournament, but she does have a favorite mascot—she would love chirping at the crows Charlie Boy and Haraark from the window, where she valiantly protects the household from all threats (unless there’s a good sunbeam for napping instead).