Customer Reviews

Disturbance of the Inner Ear: A Novel

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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.

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.

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.

Showa literature abounds. And there's a growing body of work by and about children of Holocaust survivors. But ``Disturbance of the Inner Ear'' is something fresh and unusual, surprisingly, a love story without any kind of neat resolution.

The denouement in present-day Terezienstadt, when Isabel finally confronts the ghosts with which her Holicaust-survivor father has peopled her childhood is thrilling and believable. It reminds me strongly of the way Judy Chicago's drawings in ``The Holocaust Project'' captured the banality of the death-camp sites 50 years after the war.

Hackett has a fine ear for dialogue, and has limmed believable complex characters. Guilio, the plastic-surgeon-turned-gigolo has few peers in contemporary literature, as does Clayton, the doomed neurotic 16-year-old who worships Isabel from afar.

I do not consider this a mass-market book. It is richly textured, with many cultural and musical alusions that would fly over the head of a reader of supermarket escapist literature.

The erotic dance of Isabel and Giulio, couched in the larger tale that braids themes of forgetting and remembering, loss and love, music and silence, is a wonderful read. This is a novel that is completely unafraid, a rarity. Unafraid to touch on untouchable sources of pain that make us freeze up as artists and erotic beings. Read it for the elegance of the writing, for the fearlessness that derives from sexual awakening and, simply, for the story, which is original and feels altogether true.

Joyce Hackett's novel Disturbance of the Inner Ear is the remarkable journey of a virtuoso cellist and daughter of a holocaust survivor backwards into history and forwards toward her own personal destiny. It is richly researched, miraculously constructed and, on page after page, there are remarkable, hard-won insights into the human spirit presented in crisp and elegant prose. It is a book for musicians, for Jews, for WWII and holocaust buffs, and for women whose lives and bodies don't conform to the images they see daily on TV. It has the page-turning quality of a mystery, but here the mystery is of the human heart and the great lengths it goes to deny and ultimately face its difficult truths. It is, simply, a triumph. This holiday, I intend to buy copies for my mother, my aunt, friends that are children of survivors, and readers of smart, moving fiction.

Haunting prose about an orphaned cellist's path toward understanding her roots, understanding her father, and understanding her gift. Isabel, a talented and troubled young prodigy, is debuting at Carnegie Hall on the evening that her parents are killed in an accident. A much older lover/benefactor takes her under his wings, and she is again cast adrift when he dies while the two are in Milan. Isabel tries to survive in Milan, and becomes entangled with interesting characters. She is skilled at avoidance, and is constantly running away from intimacy and revelation, running toward her roots. What made this novel particularly intriguing were the author's frequent references to music, musicians (cellists in particular), and her descriptions of Isabel's emotions and interpretations of specific pieces of music. This novel should hold particular appeal for a serious lover of classical music.

It's not often that you read a book about music that's actually musical, but Disturbance is not an ordinary book. The novel deals with the way in which music imprints itself on the narrator's brain--as subject and as form and as way of dealing with the world. It really is like she is swimming in it as she sets out trying to survive without many resources in Italy. So much of the book is about various forms of performance, as she becomes involved with an Italian doctor who moonlights as a male gigolo. It looks at the ways we instruct and command ourselves due to the training and rules we learn. REALLY interestingly written.

Joyce Hackett is a sculptural writer. She obviously knows her music - both technically and the repertoire - and she uses this information to create a novel that continues to surprise until the final page. This is a story about what we inherit from our parents, be that talent, guilt, revenge, vendetta, remorse, hunger for joy, or just the need to be, to survive. The narrator of this finely honed novel is Isabel whose father survived the Nazi camp of Theresienstadt where he had wisely survived through his gifts as a pianist as a part of the orchestra that played as Jews and other unwanted people arrived at what they believed to be a Spa, discovering once inside that it was an extermination camp. Yuri (Isabel's father) escaped death, but not before his musically gifted fingers were crushed by a guard on the day of freedom. Yuri concentrates all of his rage and frustration having escaped to Milwauakee, WI to raise his daughter,Isabel, a prodigy of the cello. He drives his daughter to extremes of performance, always reminding her of the price paid for her gift. After her successful Carnegie Hall debut her parents are killed in an accident and Isabel is unable to continue playing the cello. She is alone except for her elderly mentor who takes her as his protege and lover to Milan, Italy. There he dies and Isabel sets out to survive on her own. She soon finds employment as a tutor in a large house owned by an eccentric millionaire who demands his son be taught the cello on a rare Amati cello. Isabel's sole contact with the outside world is a plastic surgeon (Guilio) who has as strange a mental hisory as does Isabel. Through a long series of incidents, Isabel finally travels to Theresienstadt to end her tie with her father's past, intending to burn her invaluable cello in the ovens that threatened her father. "Because what Yuri lost was not two parents, or two fingers, not a musical community or a continent. What Yuri lost was a way of trusting the world, the ability to imagine that the world's immense silence contained any sort of listening. What Yuri lost was the possibility of God." "Husbanding my talent was his way of making order out of chaos."

DISTURBANCES OF THE INNER EAR sensitively evokes the traits we inherit form our parents and how we learn to cope with what our history and our contemporary life have dealt us. Isabel finds passion - physical, erotic meaning to exisiting - and embraces that passion in carving her euology for all that was in her past. At the site of Theresienstadt she once again performs for the survivors and the children of survivors the Messiaen "Quartet for the End of Time", the piece that had been her last performance at Carnegie Hall and Messiaen's utterance he wrote for the inmates of the camps. And she rises like a phoenix from that experience.

Joyce Hackett writes beautifully. Reading her book takes concentration as she has written without quotation marks, she melds the past and the present in one sentence and paragraph, and at times pushes her musical knowledge to the point of overindulgence of metaphor. Yet she has written one of the more intense and sensitive memoirs about the Holocaust. A reader recommended this book to me after reading my review of WG Sebald's "Austerlitz" and now I know why. A very fine book.

This is one of the most beautiful books I've read in the last few years. What a debut. Totally deserving of the starred PW and Kirkus reviews it recieved.

Whatever else you buy this month. Don't miss this book.