Doug Dorst walks through the streets of Eixample, which a few days ago were filled with people buying books and roses for Sant Jordi. He doesn’t have time to take a sightseeing tour, but he wants to see if he can recognize any buildings. Some time ago, in 2000, he spent an entire summer in the city. “I wouldn’t dare say that I lived here, but I did live here long enough to integrate that time. It’s the first time I’m back and I’m doing it with a good book. This satisfies me, since at that time the only thing I had was an attempt at a novel that was going nowhere,” he confesses.
The work that has brought him back to the Catalan capital is S. The Ship of Theseus (Duomo), the “bookiest” book that he remembers ever being made, “at least in recent times.” He signs it with J.J. Abrams, director of Lost and different installments of sagas such as Star Wars or Mission: Impossible, and it is a tribute “to the book as a physical object”, something they believe is “necessary” in times of screens.
It is the chronicle of two readers, Eric and Jennifer, who meet through an exchange of notes written in the margins of a library book, The Ship of Theseus, by V. M. Straka, a prolific and enigmatic author who makes people uncomfortable. to the Government and about which little is known. The protagonist of the book is a man who suffers from amnesia and is the victim of a kidnapping. This individual without a past will travel by boat with a sinister crew, beginning a disconcerting and dangerous journey in which both Eric and Jennifer, as well as the readers themselves, will end up involved. In fact, the volume contains inside postcards, handwritten letters, maps and confidential documents that will allow the most curious to advance in the plot.
The work, which is already an international phenomenon and which proposes different levels of reading, “Abrams came up with the idea when he found at the Los Angeles airport an old paperback copy of Robert Ludlum that he invited anyone who found it to keep and to transmit.” to the rest their knowledge.”
The anecdote “encouraged him to create something that readers could somehow interact with. That’s when I came into action, although I still wonder why today, since we didn’t know each other at all. I suspect that my first novel, which not many people read, went through the production company Bad Robot, of which Abrams is executive director along with the Irish actress Katie McGrath, at the insistence of my agent, who wanted me to make the leap to audiovisual production. It was a story with many voices and strange in its form, and I suppose that must have caught his attention.”
When director and writer got in touch, “I had already been playing on my own with the character of Straka, but it didn’t quite fit. And, suddenly, I felt that the perfect opportunity had arrived for him.” Abrams, who served as showrunner or creative head on the project, “gave me complete freedom to make the story as strange as I wanted. He told me not to worry, that if it ended up being too much or didn’t work, we would fix it. And that took away all the fears that could arise with this experiment.”
An experiment that was published in the US in 2013 and that now arrives in Spain without having lost any relevance. The delay, in part, “may be due to the fact that at first it scares publishers, because of how complicated I imagine the production of the book must be, but even so it has allowed us to find fantastic editors and creatives along the way who have believed in the project as much as the readers do now.” The volume, yes, costs 49 euros, precisely because of that complexity.
Although he does not rule out anything, Dorst highly doubts that both creators will use their skills in the script and end up making an audiovisual adaptation of the work. “There is no need to move it to another medium in which it would work less. S. The Ship of Theseus has never been anything other than a book and I’m sure that’s what it’s going to stay like.”
The novel did, however, make the leap to the digital space in the form of an e-book “at the wish of the publisher. They found a way. I had an option to turn off the margin comments and read only Straka’s excerpt, or the other way around. It is true that you sacrifice the illusion of having in your hands a book that seems to be taken from the library, with yellowed pages because it dates back to 1949, but, at the same time, they found a way that is not unpleasant and that has similarities with a video game. Be that as it may, this is a book that has never been seen before,” he concludes.
