It looks like a book but it is something else. A meta-literary artifact, a magical box full of enigmas, mysteries and labyrinths that challenges the norms of narrative and editing. It is ‘The Ship of Theseus’ (Duomo), the book-like invention with which screenwriter, producer, director, actor, director and composer JJ Abrams (New York, 1966) is dominating the sales charts. It is something unique, a “great adventure on paper” according to some critics. A Pandora’s box with the appearance of a well-thumbed typescript whose pages contain annotated papers, postcards, photos, handwritten letters, maps or photocopied articles.
The unique work had been on the Anglo-Saxon market for almost a decade. When the versatile Abrams had climbed the heights of film and television, as a director in the franchises ‘Star Trek’, ‘Star Wars’ or ‘Mission Impossible’ and revolutionized the world of series with ‘Lost’, he published in the United States ‘ The Ship of Theseus’, a novel only in appearance that contains seven other novels that are lived more than read and that is a hymn to the physical book in the digital age and artificial intelligence.
Abrams once said that the best way to explain his love for mystery was in a box he bought at a magic store when he was a teenager. He’s still on a shelf in his office. He never opened it. “Doing so would mean giving up hope in the prodigy,” he said. He knows that the more light is shone on something and the more its mechanism is revealed, the less fascinating it will be.
And he set out to fascinate with ‘The Ship of Theseus’, an exquisite artifact of complex production and conception, a game of clues with many paths strewn with enigmas that cannot be read in a traditional way, if we can talk about reading. JJ Abrams is the father of the original idea and its conception, but it is signed by Doug Dorst, an unknown writer for the Spanish reader, professor of creative writing at the University of Texas-San Marcos, who worked under the supervision of Abrams.
The box that encloses it is an object called ‘S’ with a seal that, when broken, releases a cloth-bound volume: ‘The Ship of Theseus’. It looks like an old book with yellowed pages, printed in 1949 in New York, perhaps written in Czech, signed by a certain VM Straka, one of the most influential authors of the century as stated in the prologue but whom no one knows, and translated into English with copious footnotes by Brazilian FX Caldeira.
Trip to get lost in
It tells of a man trapped on a mysterious ship with a diabolical crew, in what seems like an adventure narrative. But it is only one of the locks that the reader must open. On a journey in which it is easy to get lost, he must be very active to reveal enigmas, choose reading routes and find answers.
The book is supposedly a never-returned loan from the library of the imaginary Pollard State University. It bears the seal of its library and is profusely annotated by a student and a professor who communicate through its pages. In the handwritten notes in its generous margins, they record their suspicions and mistrust about a book that contains between its pages letters, photos, postcards, newspaper clippings, telegrams and a map drawn on a napkin. They are all facsimile reproductions that magnify the mystery.
The title alludes to the paradox of Plutarch, who in the 1st century in his ‘Parallel Lives’ asked if the ship in which Theseus returned from Crete with the Athenians was the same after having replaced its materials and all its crew along the way. of the years. That ancient dilemma about identity that Abrams developed in the series ‘Alias’, wondering, like Heraclitus before the current of the river, if we are the same over time when the cells of our skin and our organs change. Heraclitus warned that “it is not possible to bathe in the same river twice, because new waters always flow over you.”
Since it appeared in 2013 ‘The Ship of Theseus’ has been an object of desire for bibliophiles, geeks and lovers of rarities, as well as a highly sought-after gift despite its price. This is an expensive editorial daring that is worth every euro of the more than 45 that it costs.
«S. It wants to be a celebration of the book as a physical object. In this time of emails and text messages, and everything that moves in the cloud in an intangible way, this book is intentionally tangible. “We wanted to include things that you can actually hold in your hand,” JJ Abrams said in an interview.
Abrams came up with it when he picked up an abandoned paperback novel at an airport. “Whoever finds this book, read it, take it somewhere and leave it for someone else to find,” someone had written. He reminded her of how her college classmates left messages in the margins of the books they checked out from the library. He thought he could make an annotated book. He didn’t stop until he designed an amazing and one-of-a-kind artifact of his own.
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