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.