The Kreutzer Sonata
ABOUT
THE BOOK
The unnamed narrator of this subtly constructed novel, a young musicologist, befriends a well-known music critic, Marius van Vlooten, who is blind. The two meet on an airplane en route to a master class in Bordeaux, where the narrator introduces Marius to Suzanna, the pretty first violinist of a string quartet there to perform Janácek’s “Kreutzer Sonata.” Soon Marius and Suzanna are engaged in a passionate love affair. Through a series of conversations between Marius and the narrator, we learn the truth about Marius’s blindness, the result of a suicide attempt when, as a young student, he found his love for a woman unrequited. Now, years later, Marius is married to Suzanna, but strongly suspects she has a lover and becomes insanely jealous. His suspicions and his past draw him-and the reader-into a dramatic and tense Hitchock-like vertigo, where tragedy plays itself out.
ABOUT
THE TRANSLATOR Susan
Massotty
Susan Massotty is a literary translator whose translations include novels by Cees Nooteboom and Margriet De Moor, as well as The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank. Massotty won the 2007 Vondel Prize for translation from the Dutch or Flemish for My Father’s Notebook by Kader Abdolah. (from Words Without Borders)
Susan Massotty is a literary translator whose translations include novels by Cees Nooteboom and Margriet De Moor, as well as The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank. Massotty won the 2007 Vondel Prize for translation from the Dutch or Flemish for My Father’s Notebook by Kader Abdolah. (from Words Without Borders)