The Kreutzer Sonata
A Novel
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
With an “astute sense of musical form and a wonderful sense of passion” (New York Times Book Review), master storyteller Margriet de Moor, one of Europe’s foremost novelists, once again brings us a richly imagined and highly original tale of passion and jealousy.
The unnamed narrator, a young musicologist, meets and befriends the famous blind music critic Marius van Vlooten. Their first encounter is 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. From this chance meeting, a passionate love affair soon develops between Marius and Suzanna. They become engaged and marry.
A series of subsequent conversations between Marius and the narrator reveals the truth behind Marius’s blindness: when he was a young student, he had fallen madly in love with a girl who spurned him. Despairing, he tried to commit suicide, but succeeded only in blinding himself. Now, ten years later, Marius is prey to another terrible dilemma: he loves Suzanna desperately, but, strongly suspecting she has a lover, becomes insanely jealous. His suspicions and his past draw him—and the reader—into a dramatic and tense Hitchcockian vertigo, where the tragedy plays itself out.
This subtly constructed novel evokes powerful emotions through what the characters see and don’t see, but mostly through what they hear—the language of music.
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PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Dutch novelist de Moor (Duke of Egypt) traces narrative arabesques around the terrible romantic jealousy suffered by a blind music critic in this spare, delicate novel. In a series of chance encounters at European airports over the years, the musicologist narrator meets the famous blind patrician music critic, Marius van Vlooten, and extracts his history of tortured love. The first encounter elicits the desperate tale of unrequited love that drove Marius, as a student years before, to shoot himself in the head, thus blinding himself. The acquaintance between the two travelers continues briefly, allowing the narrator to introduce Marius to lovely Suzanna Flier, first violinist of the Schulhoff Quartet, who becomes Marius's wife. Ten years later, on the way to the Salzburg Festival, the narrator learns that Suzanna has left Marius because he tried to kill her, his jealousy roused by her love (he claims) for the violist in her quartet. Marius's obsession with Jan cek's Kreutzer sonata provides the novel's leitmotif; according to the critic, "wayward modernist" Jan cek "put things in his music that were meant not only for the listening ear but also for the inner eye." De Moor's slender, suspenseful narrative frequently shifts settings and moods, but Marius's id e fixe burns with a constant fire. Though de Moor sometimes stokes the blaze too high, this is an involving, passionate tale.
