Disturbance of the Inner Ear

by Joyce Hackett

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780786710461
Publisher:	Avalon Publishing Group
Publication date:	08/28/2002
Edition description:	First Carroll & Graf Edition
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	6.26(w) x 9.22(h) x 1.04(d)

Editorial Reviews

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her past, she stumbles into the Milan winter, taking a job as viola teacher for 16-year-old Clayton Pettyward, the withdrawn son of a rich American, who hums incessantly and names all his tropical fish after Isabel.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. (Oct.) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

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 P.L., OH Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

In a startling, memorable debut, a waning cellist prodigy is doomed to relive the trauma of her Holocaust survivor father when she's abandoned in Italy after the death of her beloved caretaker and teacher. Isabel Masurovsky, a Jew of Russian descent on her father's side (he was an acclaimed pianist interned in the "model" concentration camp of Terezin, Czechoslovakia), was raised in Milwaukee though already performing her cello on world stages. It's now ten years after her parents' death in a violent car accident, and Isabel, in her mid-20s, finds herself again alone in the world when her elderly maestro and lover, Signor Perso, dies in his sleep in their pension room in Milan. Literally lifted off the sidewalk by a smooth, moneyed surgeon, Giulio, who doubles as a gigolo, Isabel stumbles into a live-in position teaching viola to a clumsy, recalcitrant teenager at the home of a wealthy diplomat named Pettyward-who also possesses a rare 16th-century cello ordered by Charles IX from Andrea Amati. Isabel's knowledge of the world has been fed to her by the gentle, aphasic Signor Perso, on the one hand, and by her bloody-minded father, Yuri, on the other, who strong-armed her prodigious early career via a desperately ruthless philosophy of survival gleaned from having to play for his captors in the Nazi camp. Gingerly, Isabel finds her way, loathe to fall for the suavely suspect Giulio lest she betray her father's wary teaching: "Was crossing into evil as simple as deciding to survive at any cost?" Hackett manages a marvelous balance between irony and innocence in Isabel's voice and along the way works in an enormous amount of research on rare instruments and the history of classical music.Organization is occasionally erratic, but Hackett scores big with her shimmering bon mots and breathtaking elegiac atmosphere. A rare find: a thinking, feeling novelist with a stinging stylistic flair and a monumental story to tell. First serial to the Paris Review

Kirkus Reviews