Sulzer, Alain Claude. Aus den Fugen: Roman (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2012)

The Swiss writer Sulzer’s novel Aus den Fugen focuses around a performance by a concert pianist of Beethoven’s ‘Hammerklavier’ sonata that breaks off midway. Refusing the drive to resolution that musicologists have described in Beethoven’s music, the novel also shows characters’ identities and relationships being challenged and reformulated around this moment of musical incompletion. Its interest in sexuality ranges from the queer and the intergenerational to the desires at play in heterosexual marriage.