But Abrams and Dorst don't make it too hard: the earlier chapters of the book contain a preponderance of blue and black marginalia, the later chapters red and purple. These color-coded scribbles are all jumbled up, of course comments take their cue from passages in the text, and especially from hints in Caldeira's many riddling footnotes, rather than from any chronological imperative, and it takes a while to get the order-of-events sorted in one's head. Finally Jen's purple and Eric's red, after they have finally met in person and (it's no spoiler to say this, since it's obvious from early on this is where the story is going) fallen in love. The different colors speak to different layers of annotation: grey pencil for the oldest (just Eric alone, annotating the book sparely as he rereads it) then Jen's blue and Eric's black for their first run through, in dialogue with one another then Jen's orange and Eric's green after they have been conversing for a while, and when Eric has traveled to Europe and Brazil to uncover aspects of the mystery. They are both fascinated by the novel, and the various mysteries associated with it-who was Straka? Was his name the pseudonym of one of a half dozen common suspects, or was he actually the translator Caldeira in disguise? Was he involved in an actual conspiracy during the first half of the twentieth century? Murdered by fascists? Did he commit suicide?
These two are present-day readers who have been swapping the book between them, leaving it in a certain spot in the university library and replying to one another's marginalia with more marginalia. The margins of this work are chock full of handwritten annotations, in half a dozen different colored inks and two recognizable hands: one a man's (we discover he is called Eric), all caps the other a woman's (Jen), a more elegantly lower-case script. The text of the novel-supposedly the nineteenth and last production of its reclusive European writer, translated into English by a certain "F.
Straka" called Ship of Theseus (1949), complete with a peel-off sticker with a catalog number on the spine and a much-stamped "Return On or Before Latest Date Stamped Below" sheet on the inside back cover. represent a meticulously faked University Library copy of a novel by "V. My thought as I took this book from its slipcase was: "by Paxman's Beard, this must have cost a royal ransom to produce!" I mean, the book itself, the actual artefact.
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