Doug Dorst, S. (2013)

What S. looks like is a book called Ship of Theseus by V. M. Straka, published in 1949. Translated into English, the book has footnotes by its translator, F. X. Caldeira. It's a specific copy, taken out of a high school library and never returned by a guy named Eric; the book is filled with his annotations as he (much later) prepares to write his doctoral thesis on it. His copy is found by an undergraduate library worker named Jen, who responds to his annotations, and then he replies to hers, and so on. (Different colors of ink allow you to partially decode the sequence of annotations.) There are also physical objects in the book, like longer letters between the two, postcards, newspaper clippings, photocopies of journal articles, and so on. (The book was originally published with a slipcase that I believe credits the real author—Doug Dorst, from an idea by film director J. J. Abrams—but my library copy doesn't have that, so someone who picked the book up off the shelf without context would, I suspect, be somewhat baffled!)

Some friends recommended this book to me back in grad school. (I think the same friends who recommended me The Signature of All Things, actually.) S. is the kind of book that scholar Katherine Hayles would call a "technotext": one that draws attention to the fact that it is a text, a physical assemblage, like Steven Hall's The Raw Shark Texts. (This is distinct from metafictions, works that call attention to the fact that they are fictions, though some books are both metafiction and technotext.) Back in grad school I was briefly obsessed with these kinds of books, though I had the much more awkward descriptor "non-novel novels," novels told in the forms of things that were not novels; many years later I discovered the much better descriptor of "hermit crab fictions" for this kind of thing.

S. was certainly inspired by Nabokov's Pale Fire, where you have a book that's been translated and annotated, and the narrative emerges from the tension between the embedded story and the act of annotation. But it goes further. We have a few different stories here: 1) There's the actual story of Ship of Theseus, a sort of Kafkaesque one about a guy who ends up on a mysterious ship and in the employ of a mysterious group. 2) There's the story of how Ship of Theseus was written and its mysterious author, Straka, and his relationship with his translator, Caldeira. 3) There's the story of Eric and Jen and their growing relationship with each other as they work to uncover the story of Straka, Caldeira, and the mysterious S., while competing with Eric's former Ph.D. advisor. (I'm much less certain if Dorst read this, but there's definitely resonances with the best novel about literary criticism ever written, A. S. Byatt's Possession. The other book this reminded me a lot of, actually, is Daniel Handler's Lemony Snicket: The Unauthorized Autobiography. Is S. just A Series of Unfortunate Events for grownups?)

Ship of Theseus by V. M. Straka

Published: 2013
Read: January 2026

So it's a complicated book, and a bit difficult to read. According to the Internet, some people actually read Ship of Theseus first, and then the footnotes, and then the first time track of Jen/Eric interactions, and then the second, and so on! I ended up reading one chapter with its footnotes, and then doubling back and reading all the Eric/Jen annotations for that chapter, just doing my best to keep in mind what had happened when in each of the three parallel tracks. (I wasn't capable of reading more than one chapter in a single sitting; it took up a lot of cognitive load to read this book!) I don't think I could have read all of Ship of Theseus on its own without the other layers; the embedded novel is intermittently interesting, but it never grabbed me, possibly because one never shakes the feeling its been constructed as a clue in a mystery and not a genuine novel. 

It is beautiful to look at; the team that designed it did an excellent job, as it really looks like a 1930s library book, and the annotations and the interpolated objects all look authentic. (Nice of Eric and Jen to be very consistent about their ink colors, though!) I loved the very dumb articles in the student newspaper; they are all quite accurate to my experience reading many many student newspapers. It's just a pleasure to thumb through the book and consider it. Back when I was in grad school, people were arguing about books-as-conveyors-of-information and books-as-physical-objects, and what we lose through digitization (they might still be arguing about these things, I don't know, I've moved on), and this is definitely a book that trades on the power of the latter. There is an ebook and even an audiobook... but why? what would be the point of reading the book in such forms? The pleasure of the book is remembering the pleasure of reading any well-loved book, thumbing through it, trying to find its depths and mysteries, something any lover of literature can identify with, I am sure.

As I said, I didn't find the Ship of Theseus story terribly interesting; I also wasn't very much into the mystery of Straka and Caldeira. Thinking of books as a series of mysteries to decode, with right or wrong answers, just doesn't resonate with how I read literature. (It doesn't seem too much of a surprise, however, to discover that J. J. Abrams thinks of literature this way.) There's some good stuff here but I just wasn't interested in the puzzle-solving aspect of the book, and I was very happy for Eric and Jen to do all that work for me. Some people who've read the book have done deep dives on exactly who Straka and Caldeira and S. were and what happened between them. I can't imagine myself doing that!

What I can imagine doing, however, is doing a deep dive on Eric and Jen. They, for me, were the real success of the book. What the annotations also capture is that feeling of being in love with a book and the joy of exploring it with someone else. Reading is a solitary activity in some ways but it's also a communal one. We bond over books, we love it when we can share a book we love with someone else who ends up loving it as much as we do. And loving stories in this way can be an aspect of actual love, of coming to know and love someone else. I recommended the book to my department's staff assistant (after a discussion of Nabokov with her lead me to Pale Fire and then to S.), and she told me it was one of the best romance novels she'd ever read. I hadn't thought of it as a romance novel, but I immediately knew that she was right.

Here is a bit of a spoiler, but a bit I found particularly interesting was when you find out Jen and Eric have had sex. Obviously you discover that fictional characters have had sex all the time! But when I found out they had had sex, I had a little bit of a shudder, like I had found out something I wasn't supposed to find out, like the time I was helping a student do something on her laptop and a sext from her boyfriend popped up. (Macs are weird.) The form of the book creates an intimacy with Eric and Jen, but a voyeuristic one. They're falling in love, but you're overhearing it, and you're not supposed to. This is their copy of the book, not yours. The ending of their story is particularly cute. 

It's been over a decade since the book came out, and I think it's probably set when it came out, so Eric and Jen would be in their mid-to-late thirties now. It's easy to imagine them still existing, though I don't know exactly what they would be doing. I hope they're happy together still, and I hope they've figured out their lives. It's hard work to figure yourself out, but figuring out literature gives you a blueprint to do it, so they ought to be able to if they put in the effort.