The Locked Room is a book of a substitute or of a changeling if you wish.
A man occupies the place that doesn’t belong to him…

In general, lives seem to veer abruptly from one thing to another, to jostle and bump, to squirm. A person heads in one direction, turns sharply in mid-course, stalls, drifts, starts up again. Nothing is ever known, and inevitably we come to a place quite different from the one we set out for.

I believe everyone has one’s own Heart of Darkness place where one must go to meet one’s dark alter ego or one’s adversarial ego to fight it and win… or be defeated.

It took me much longer to read this than necessary. For a few reasons probably. But they're all irrelevant now. What is done is done, and my reading of this book is done.
The Locked Room is the final installment of Paul Auster's brilliant metafictional postmodern mess of tragic and unique subversive-by-design mystery tales known as The New York Trilogy. It is a really short book, but ir has a lot in it for you to take in, but at the same time it doesn't really. Fitting for this series of novels, this final chapter pieces together a few parts of Paul's puzzling drama, but then decides to leave things intentionally murky by the end. It very much reflects the first installment of the trilogy (which I, admittedly, still believe to be by far the best entry), there are not only some references to it, whether they be direct or indirect, but some moments and themes which directly mirror it. The relationships are somewhat similair, except this one is told from a slightly alternate perspective. This is told from the guy who gets the better end of the deal...only to make the novel feel even more tragic in the end. Somehow.

Loved, loved, loved this book.

By far my favourite out of the three NY novels. Beautiful and clear pose, amazing insights on love and identity, and truly fleshed out characters! 4*

Of the three books in the trilogy, this feels like it has the most pronounced 'story', in that it starts off as a more straight forward tale of a man asked to step in to help when his friend disappears. Left with the choice to publish his friend's written work or not, he ends up falling in love with the wife and stepping more into his friend's life than he wanted. But then the story starts to unravel and echoes of the previous two stories reverberate between the words as the ghost of Fanshawe hovers around their life. Unlike the other two books, I also felt there was a bit of hope at the end - The narrator is forced to face some of his own past and some of his own internal issues, even as he ends up having to face Fanshawe. But in the end, some sort of compromise is reached and life continues - just as it would in the real world.

The narrator reconnects with his childhood friend's wife Sophie. She tells him Fanshawe has disappeared, most likely dead, but left behind a large collection of unpublished writings. The narrator reads it over and publishes it to great fanfare in the literary community. Later he marries Sophie and adopts her boy. But the narrator knows Fanshawe is still alive!

Later he begins to drive himself crazy by attempting to write a biography of his friend.

It's a pretty good tale but doesn't have a lot of tension. We basically know where it's going to go from the start.

New York Üçlemesi içerisinde en sevdiğim kitap oldu Kilitli Oda. Serinin diğer kitaplarına yapılan gödermeler ve kitabın konusunu sevdim. Her ne kadar polisiye tatında bir kitap denilse de tanıtımlarında psikolojik gerilim, drama ,kara kurgu ve bilinmezlik arasında bir kitap olduğunu düşündüm .

(3.5) While most of the New York Trilogy is told in the third person, this is a first-person narrative that seems to pick up where City of Glass left off. It begins in 1977, when the unnamed narrator gets a letter from Sophie Fanshawe, the wife of his childhood best friend, telling him that Fanshawe disappeared six months ago, and despite the best efforts of the detective Quinn (the main character in CoG; the narrator also later encounters Peter Stillman on a trip to Paris), no trace of him can be found. The narrator has been named Fanshawe’s literary executor and takes it upon himself to get the man’s unpublished work out into the world: plays are produced, novels are published. He also starts writing a biography of the friend he always envied. It’s more like he’s becoming Fanshawe, especially when he marries Sophie. Doubling has been a big theme of the trilogy, and here the metaphorical kill-or-be-killed situation seems to turn literal at the conclusion, which I didn’t particularly understand.

The metafictional element of this novel is that Fanshawe’s early life is a lot like Paul Auster’s as revealed in Winter Journal, while Sophie’s resembles his wife Siri Hustvedt’s (and the author pair would later name their daughter Sophie). Ghosts added nothing for me; nor did this one particularly. You could easily stop after City of Glass. For the trilogy as a whole it’s 3.5*.

Okay, so this is the final book of the New York Trilogy by Paul Auster, and, you know, I really don't know what it was all about. It was fascinating to read it, but I think I leave it as unenlightened as I came in. It's all very metafictional, and that is not usually my thing.

Still, the fact that I read all three in a single day, and the fact that I do quite like the prose, quiet as it is, should say that I think it was worth it. I think it might even stick with me, to be turned over in my thoughts now and then, just to check on the moss growing underneath...

در نظرم، این داستان از سه‌گانه نیویورک جذابیت و هیجان انگیز تر از دو داستان قبلی بوده و بخش بیشتری از توقعات خواننده را که از دو داستان قبلی انتظار می‌رفت، برآورده می‌کند.

Who is Paul Auster?
The question that kept resurfacing onto my mind here and then whilst going along with the narrator into this immersive journey about ...
About? Hmm good question.
Identity. Is that right? But whose? Are we in a mission to crack the cryptic Farnshaw or rather the non less cryptic Auster?
Or is it more about memory and the role others play in shaping out who we are?
It is all this and more for sure. Unlike with Ghosts book#2 , here I was kept gripped until the very last page. Besides bringing these very existential questions of life and of creation and authorship to fore, the Locked Room gives an anticipatory, nearly prophetical account of the reader's satisfaction when reaching the end of the book. A sort of feeling of having seen the pieces of the jigsaw even though the pieces do not hold together as in a traditional jigsaw. The sense lies one level above.
Auster, a postmodernist indeed.

Éste tercer libro de la trilogía es el que más enganchada me ha tenido, más fácil de entender a primera vista y, sin embargo, tengo la sensación de que no he entendido muchas cosas. De que muchas cosas han pasado sin yo percatarme del todo en el trasfondo de la mente del autor. Auster gira alrededor de las ideas de sus dos libros anteriores y de alguna manera hay una conclusión pero sigo dándole vueltas.