[...] As a child, Wertheimer fled Austria with his parents and sister, and soon after returning to their patrimony, the parents died in a car accident. We receive this history in brief, breathless flashes near the novel’s end, biographical information the narrator refuses to connect explicitly to Wertheimer’s suicide. The narrator’s fixation creates a world far more claustrophobic than its reality, one that denies the true horror of history, only because it does not fit within the psychological walls of his music education in Salzburg. His belief in artistic competition, in an art that resembles sports in its rankings and its clear-cut determination of winners and losers, is so all-encompassing that it becomes a scheme by which he can explain a life and deny the world.