Summary Synopsis
Fanshawe was the best friend of mine. He was smart, sophisticated and striking but excellent normal boy. Dropped out of Harvard, he became a crew of an oil tanker, then wandered around Paris and South France. And he wrote much of writing such as novels, poetry, dramas and notebooks. But he didn’t want to publish them.
He got back to the United States, then he married Sophie. But he suddenly disappeared from her, after three or four months he had promised he would publish the manuscripts within a year.
Sophie requested me to publish Fanshawe’s manuscripts. Then the Fanshawe’s books earned a great reputation and sold well, so we got a certain amount of money from the books. And I became a kind of agent of his books and wrote articles and reviews about him. I got the job to write a biography of Fanshawe, so I went to Paris and South France for searching the traces of him. Then I lost myself in searching for and thinking about Fanshawe…
Book Review
I think this novel is an autobiographical story of Paul Auster. The story indicates a self-reflection or self-affirmation of Auster himself.
Auster reflected his very hungry youth to Fanshawe, he got on Tanker and wandered around Europe, Paris and the South France. Episodes and histories of the narrator and Fanshawe resemble his real experiences appeared on his autobiographical essay the Art of Hunger. On the other hand, he reflected older him after he had became writer.
The main and exterior story of this novel is the narrator sought Fanshawe’s whereabouts. But the true theme of this novel is Fanshawe’s true intention, and philosophical questions to what are today’s human identity and the meaning and the meaninglessness of life and writing, and considerations on to create a story and its difficulty.
And the title The Locked Room means the locked room of the country house in South France, where Fanshawe had shut himself up. The room is the metaphor of Fanshawe’s locked true intention and mind.
Fanshawe was the alter ego or the other self of the narrator. The more the narrator pursued for and thought about Fanshawe, he felt difficulty and complexity like looking at himself or his doppelgänger. And Auster reflected himself on the two characters. So I think this complexity might be arose from the self-referring act as Auster sees Auster himself.
Different to Auster’s former two novel, this novel doesn’t modelled on detective stories. But this novel is a story of “hide and seek”, to search Fanshawe’s whereabouts and riddles. And the narrator said his act was like a detective. And, so, I think the narrator is not only detective of facts about Fanshawe, but also it seeks Fanshawe’s mind and true intention.
There’s a triple self-reflection or self-affirmation and story-telling structure was constructed by each one of Fanshawe, the narrator and Auster, I think. The narrator described things about Fanshawe. Auster described things about the narrator (and Fanshawe). By this self-reflection structure, this novel expresses and asks an answerless question of what are writing and the self.
This novel is slippery one. For example, there’s no description of content of Fanshawe’s writings, and there are no answer, result and destination. Also this novel is a writing about writing or a novel about writing novel. And words of Fanshawe’s red notebook was “their final purpose was to cancel each other out“ (§ 9, p. 313), also the notion can apply to this novel, the content of this novel is to cancel each other out. So there was no answer and solution, and only a state of contradiction was remain. No answer should be the answer of this novel and the consequence of the New York Trilogy.
The storytelling is very excellent and thrilling, also the philosophical considerings about writing and existence are significant. Auster succeed in compose this beautiful and thoughtful story by his real experiences. He splendidly expressed worth, delight agony and misery of writing and life.
Details of the Book
The New York Trilogy
Paul Auster
Faber & Faber, London, 2 Jun 2011
320 pages, £5.99
ISBN: 978-0571276554
Contents:
- City of Glass
- Ghosts
- The Locked Room
Related Posts and Pages
Synopsis & Book Review | City of Glass
Synopsis & Book Review | Ghosts
YouTube Paul Auster Commentary Playlist
YouTube Literature & Philosophy Channel