For twenty years, Konrad has imprisoned himself and his crippled wife in an abandoned lime works where he's conducted odd auditory experiments and prepared to write his masterwork, The Sense of Hearing. As the story begins, he's just blown the head off his wife with the Mannlicher carbine she kept strapped to her wheelchair. The murder and the bizarre life that led to it are the subject of a mass of hearsay related by an unnamed life-insurance salesman in a narrative as mazy, byzantine, and mysterious as the lime works, Konrad's sanctuary and tomb."A masterfully dense set of esthetic, social and political metaphors about contemporary life, about art, about obsessive commitment to anything....The book is a jungle of meaning, the opposite of simplistic allegory, and a major achievement."—William Kennedy, The New Republic