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 Janacek's Kreutser 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 reveal 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 Hitchcock-like vertigo, where tragedy plays itself out.