Today’s pair of 
novels is another wildly disparate pairing. Danzy Senna’s Colored Television is a realist portrayal of a novelist and low-ranking academic tempted into television writing, albeit on spec with a producer of dubious motivation. The sole bit of surrealism is when Senna and her family move into a retirement home towards the end of the book. I enjoyed the book and its portrayal of Los Angeles life, filling me with nostalgia for my own Angeleno days.
Jennifer Croft’s The Extinction of Irena Rey, on the other hand, while superficially a realist novel grows increasingly bizarre in its portrayal of a group of translators whose relationship to the Polish author they translate into various languages, with perhaps the first clue of absurdity coming with the Serbian and Slovenian translators not treating each other with burning hatred (and the Slovene calmly accepting being called a Croat).¹ Plus, Croft deploys copious footnotes.²
In my initial set of brackets, I had picked Colored Television to advance, but on reflection, I think I prefer the weirdness of The Extinction of Irena Rey.
My judgment on the judgment
It’s kind of spooky how much Alena Saunders’s perspective matched my own. She’s just obviously right all the way through.
- For those who aren’t aware of south Slavic cultural politics, although there’s not a lot of difference between Slovenes, Serbs and Croats, we like to emphasize those differences and don’t particularly like being mixed up with the others.
- I love footnotes.
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