The Scarlet Notebook

 

From Paul Auster's novel 4321: 

 

The Scarlet Notebook was going to be difficult, far and away the most challenging work he had ever attempted, and Ferguson had serious doubts about whether he could pull it off. A book about a book, a book that one could read and also write in, a book that one could enter as if it were a three-dimensional physical space, a book that was the world and yet of the mind, a conundrum, a fraught landscape filled with beauties and dangers, and little by little a story would begin to develop inside it that would thrust the fictitious author, F., into a confrontation with the darkest elements of himself. A dream book. A book about the immediate realities in front of F.'s nose. An impossible book that could not be written and would surely devolve into a chaos of random, unconnected shards, a pile of meaninglessness. Why attempt to do such a thing? Why not simply invent another story and tell it as any other writer would? Because Ferguson was no longer interested in telling mere stories. Because Ferguson wanted to test himself against the unknown and see if he could survive the struggle.

 

(6.4, 895-96)

 

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