Disturbance of The Inner Ear

DISTURBANCE OF THE INNER EAR a novel by Joyce Hackett

Reading Guide

About This Book:

Days after Isabel Masurovsky arrives in Italy with her elderly teacher and lover, he dies in their hotel room, leaving her stranded. A broken down former prodigy cellist, Isabel is the daughter of a world-renowned pianist who survived the Czech concentration camp Theresienstadt. The extreme survival prescriptions her father instilled ring in her ear, and she has been frozen and unable to perform since his death. But she bluffs her way into a job at the home of a shady miserly millionaire named Mr. Pettyward, teaching his tone-deaf teenage son Clayton. Soon she discovers the instrument his father is hiding, a legendary cello that was confiscated by the Nazis and never resurfaced.

Isabel secretly takes the cello to play at her teacherπs funeral. Afterwards, as she is wandering the streets, she meets a cagey surgical resident named Giulio, who has a complicated past of his own. A compulsive performer and liar, Giulio courts Isabel, daring her to trust him even after he reveals that he is a gigolo. When Clayton is gravely injured in an accident, Isabel entrusts himãand herselfãto Giulioπs care. But, terrified of the damage she may cause him, Isabel flees from Clayton when he needs her most. With the Savant in her possession she heads to Theresienstadt, determined to burn the cello in the campπs crematorium. Her plan unravels when Giulio follows and dares her to play the cello she is destined to play, to live not in her fatherπs time but in her own.

Disturbance of the Inner Ear is a story of two unlikely soulmates, of inherited trauma healed by erotic love. With a startling mix of intimacy and edgy evasiveness, Joyce Hackett creates a spellbinding musical voice that pulls the reader into the bookπs hypnotic internal logic. Imbued with profound compassion and a keen sense of the absurd, this fiercely original novel conjures a ravaged landscape where existence is stripped to its barest and anything is possible.

For Discussion:

1. Isabel interrupts her own story with instructions that take the form of musical notations. How does Isabel use the language of music to help herself cope with difficult situations? Does her reliance on this strategy ultimately help or hurt her? How does her use of self-imposed commands, and her understanding of them, change as the book progresses?

2. In an effort to protect her from suffering what he suffered, Yuri indoctrinates Isabel with the lessons he took away from his experience at Theresienstadt. Yet he keeps her from knowing too much about what he experienced. How does this lack of concrete knowledge affect Isabel? Do any of these lessons prove useful to Isabel? When does she first start to question their place in her perspective?

3. Isabel never refers to Signor Perso by his first name; as she explains, ≥Signor Perso and I had met as teacher and student, when I was fifteen and he was sixty-six, so we had never stopped using the formal.≤ (p. 17) Yet she calls her father by his first name, Yuri. What do the names Isabel uses for these two men signify about her relationships with them? How would you describe Isabelπs relationship with Signor Perso? Did it help Isabel cope with her past, or did it prevent her from understanding it?

4. Isabelπs mother, Renata, was unaware of how Yuri parented Isabel; it took her three years to notice that her daughter brushed her teeth with salt. What do you make of Renataπs failure to witness the reality of her daughterπs life? Does she, by focusing on the joy of the music, save her daughterπs psyche? Or does she, by her failure to witness the dynamic that develops between Isabel and Yuri, contribute to Isabelπs trauma? Why does Isabel participate in keeping her in the dark?

5. How does Mr. Pettywardπs parenting of Clayton compare to how Yuri treated Isabel? Similarly, how does Renataπs behavior compare to Marie-Antoinetteπs? Does the source of Isabelπs traumaãthe Holocaustãmake her trauma fundamentally different than the pain and neglect Clayton experiences? Do questions about the uniqueness of the Holocaust honor its legacy, or do they denigrate it? Do all parents, to a greater or lesser degree, traumatize their children in trying too hard to protect them?

6. The act of performingãwhether musically, sexually, or interpersonallyã haunts both Isabel and Giulio. In what ways does Giulio perform for Isabel and for others? How does deception function in his ≥performances≤? In the car on the way to the inn, Isabel sees that Giulioπs ravaged face reflects ≥the exhausted relief at the end of a battle: finally, he had stopped performing.≤ (p. 194). What role does Isabel play in bringing him to this point? And what is it about Giulioπs approach that enables Isabel to finally perform again? How does her performance at the end of the novel relate to Giulio having finally stopped performing?

7. What is it about Giulioπs love that enables Isabel to trust him, and to begin to heal? How is the erotic love between them different from Isabelπs other love relationships, particularly with Clayton and Signor Perso? What is healing about true erotic love? In what way does Giulio bear witness to Isabelπs life in a way that others who love her do not? Why can Giulio take risks with Isabel that Signor Perso and Clayton cannot? What role does the philosophy of Giulioπs ancestor Rabbi Luzzatto play in his relationship with Isabel?

8. When Isabel first moves into the Pettyward house, Clayton all but ignores her. What happens to make him open up, and what part does Isabel play in deepening their relationship? How does Claytonπs love for Isabel enable her to rethink herself, and her past? How does she come to understand the consequences of her own failure to witness her fatherπs pain?

9. After leaving Clayton in the hospital, Isabel says, ≥There was no way to explain that I was loving him by leaving, to speak of what would happen if I stayed.≤ (p. 201). What does Isabel mean by this? What does she think would have happened if she had stayed? Like Yuri, Isabel acts with good intentionsãbut is she ultimately responsible of Claytonπs death?

10. Since her parents died, Isabel has believed that it was her abandonment of Yuriπs rules and prescriptions that killed them. While at Theresienstadt, however, she finally understands that her rebellion on stage was not the cause of her parentsπ crash (p. 234). How does Claytonπs death, and Isabelπs relationship with Giulio, help her finally to understand this?

11. Isabel drags the Savant to Terezin intending to burn it in the crematorium. What compels her to want to commit such a terrible act? Does her desire to burn the Savant represent a break from Yuriπs efforts to bind her to his past, or is it a fulfillment of Yuriπs prescriptions? What makes Isabel decide not to go through with it?

12. Shortly before Claytonπs accident, Isabel watches him and understands that he was as unable to conceive of her terror as she was her fatherπs. This realization leads her to remark, ≥A past was not something anyone could love you out of.≤ (p. 150). At the end of the novel, do you think Isabel still believes this? Has Giulioπs love enabled her to strip herself of her past? What perspective does the author leave us with, about how to cope with the effects of a damaging past in our present lives?

The Book in Context:

1. How does Isabel compare with that other famous American Isabel in Italy, in Henry Jamesπ Portrait of a Lady? Are Isabelπs eyes opened by Europe, or have they been closed by it? What is the nature of emigration and exile for the two women?

2. At the beginning of the novel, when Isabel says she ≥fell as a dead body falls≤, Hackett is quoting Danteπs description of swooning, as he enters hell. In what way has Isabel, like Dante, lost her way not just physically but morally? What makes Giulio, corrupt as he is himself, able to serve as her guide? And why does he, like Virgil, need to release her to complete her journey alone? How do the two survivors Isabel encounters at Theresienstadt compare to the two angels Dante encounters in the beginning of Purgatory? How does Hackett play on Danteπs notions of sin? As a failure to be in the present? As a failure to see others? Or as a turning away from oneπs own divine self?

3. Samuel Beckettπs quote at the end of his novel The Unnameable (≥I canπt go on, I must go on, I canπt go on, I must go onãIπll go on.≤) has become a emblem for 20th century existential struggle. How does Isabel, in her self-interruptions and self-imposed musical instructions, reflect the struggle Beckett articulates? How would you compare the resolutions the two authors arrive at?

4. Giulioπs ancestor, the Rabbi Moses Hayyim Luzzatto, was an eighteenth century Italian mystic and Kabbalist who believed that ≥the body is the vector of divine knowledge, perfect in the moment of bliss.≤ (p. 141). For Luzzatto it is the vessel through which the soul can attain free will and, in so doing, come closer to God. How does Giulio use Luzzattoπs notion of the body in his medical practice, and sexual life? Does he come to inhabit his own body in the course of the book? When Isabel cuts her hair and has a number ≥tattooed≤ on her arm, how does her attempt to physically experience the past help her move through it? At the end of the novel, what finally enables Isabel to reinhabit her body and play the Savant?