Disturbance of the Inner Ear: A Novel

By Joyce Hackett

Book 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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 078671218X
• ISBN13: 9780786712182
• Release Date: October 2003
• Publisher: Da Capo Press
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.8" x 0.8" x 5.5"

Customer Reviews

A musical novel in musical prose

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.

haunting, poetic and funny

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.

Disturbing, in a Good Way

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.

A Beautiful Book

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.

a lyrical and deeply affecting debut

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.