Disturbance of the Inner Ear: A Novel [Hardcover]

Joyce Hackett (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 16, 2002

Dark, intense, and often very funny, this critically lauded debut novel tells a story of inherited trauma healed by erotic love in the lives of two unlikely soul mates: Isabel, a former cello prodigy and daughter of a Holocaust survivor, and Giulio, an Italian gigolo. With its hypnotic internal logic, Disturbance of the Inner Ear conjures a ravaged landscape in which anything is possible. Hackett's musical language comes alive in a pitch-perfect first-person narrative that is evasive yet intimate, and utterly unforgettable. Stylistically daring and psychologically acute, this dazzling debut marks the arrival of an exciting new novelist.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Defiantly out of the ordinary and meticulously composed, this intensely inward-focused novel narrates the wanderings of Isabel Masurovsky, a former child prodigy cellist adrift in Italy. Isabel's father, Yuri, is a survivor of Theresienstadt, the Nazi concentration camp for high-level prisoners. In Brooklyn after the war, he pressures his gifted daughter to perform. Her Carnegie debut at 14 is a smashing success, but soon afterward her parents are killed in an accident, and she gives up the cello. Ten years later, she appears in Milan, beside the dead body of Signor Perso, the old man who has been her teacher, lover and caretaker since her parents' death. Deprived of the one person who knows her past, she stumbles into the Milan winter, taking a job as viola teacher for 16-year-old Clayton Pettyward, the withdrawn son of a rich American, who hums incessantly and names all his tropical fish after Isabel. She also crosses paths with Giulio, a plastic surgeon and gigolo who is as detached in his own way as she is in hers, and they embark on a curious love affair. Hackett's dense, staggered narration skips from present to past and back again, building up an unusual yet wholly credible portrait of Isabel, who religiously practices self-denial until a tragic accident makes her realize how destructive her behavior has become. The novel concludes with her visit to Theresienstadt, where she is determined to burn a valuable cello belonging to Clayton's father. Incisively written and often inspired, this keenly imagined novel earns admittance to a small collection of similarly uncompromising, stylistically distinctive novels, among them the works of Jean Rhys and Jane Bowles.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

With the death of her cello teacher, Signor Perso, Isabel Masurovsky is overcome with memories of her parents, who perished in a car crash on the night of her Carnegie Hall debut. A child prodigy, Isabel was managed by her father, Yuri, a Holocaust survivor and an acclaimed pianist in his own right. Now living in Italy and teaching cello to a reluctant young student, Isabel meets a surgeon named Giulio, who is also a male prostitute. Though an unlikely couple, they help each other come to terms with their individual problems. Isabel's quest to make peace with her past and to start living in the present culminates in Terezin, formerly in Czechoslovakia, where she finds the remains of the Nazi camp, Theresienstadt. Here, Yuri played piano in the prisoner orchestra which saved his life. With a real flair for language, first novelist Hackett tells a fascinating story that makes the reader eager to hear the music that Isabel describes. For larger fiction collections in public and academic libraries.
Lisa Rohrbaugh, East Palestine Memorial
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 277 pages
• Publisher: Carroll & Graf; 1ST edition (September 16, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0786710462
• ISBN-13: 978-0786710461
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,093,949 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a lyrical and deeply affecting debut, September 10, 2002

By 

Alyson Richman "author" (huntington bay, new york United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Disturbance of the Inner Ear: A Novel (Hardcover)

Joyce Hackett's debut is a stunning literary achievment. With exquisite, lyrical prose, her novel strips bare a character that is burdened not only by the impossible weight of musical greatness, but also by the oppressive and often suffocating reality of survivor guilt. What happens to a character born to a parent who has endured the horrors of a concentration camp? A parent who associates musical greatness with survival.
Ms. Hackett has successfully woven a story about a young cellist who embarks on an emotional and painful journey to retrieve a priceless cello that once belonged to a gifted Jewish musician. As she sets out to retrieve the instrument which was wrongrully taken from its owner years before, Isabel Masurovsky is forced to confront the haunting and short-lived lives of her parents, as well as her own personal and musical failures. With the slow, mournful voice of a cello, this novel is an exquisite reminder of how lonely artistic genius can be and how the memory and the anguish of the holocaust still lingers in the bones of the children whose parents survived it.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A musical novel in musical prose, January 14, 2003

By 

J Scott Morrison (Middlebury VT, USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Disturbance of the Inner Ear: A Novel (Hardcover)

There have been many novels with musical themes - Mann's Doctor Faustus; Vikram Seth's An Equal Music; Ann Patchett's Bel Canto, to name one acknowledged masterpiece and two more recent books. This is another. It's the hauntingly told story of a virtuoso cellist, Isabel Masurovsky, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, himself a pianist. In a mélange of remembering and forgetting she believes she has lost her musical gift forever; she is adrift. The style of writing is somewhat disjunct, but close reading allows one to catch the thread of the narrative, and one realizes that the disjointed narrative reflects Isabel's inner life as she struggles to reclaim her gift and begin her life anew.

The story itself is harrowing, yet tender and wise. But the novel's main glory is Hackett's use of language. A couple of examples, picked almost at random: "I floated out into his flood of language, grabbing at branches, but not understanding much." "Milan is a grim, gray, German city. Its few surviving Italian grace notes dim amid chord after heavy chord of industrial postwar morass."

The writer obviously knows a great deal about music and, for this musical reader, her surefootedness on musical topics helps make it a joy to read. So often writers strike false notes in their musical prose.

Recommended urgently.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Beautiful Book, October 7, 2002

By 

"blsand" (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Disturbance of the Inner Ear: A Novel (Hardcover)

I savored every word of Joyce Hackett's extraordinary book. I loved it for its wonderful use of the language and for the almost mythic content of the story it presents. Hackett has got inside the mind of a musician, and inside the mind of the guilt-ridden child of a concentration camp survivor. A vein of ironic humor runs through the story of the unexpected circumstances that bring about her heroine's eventual personal and musical liberation. Not an ounce of sentimentality. A wonderful piece of writing. Vigorously recommended.