With dazzling musical language
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.
A former prodigy cellist, Isabel Masurovsky is the daughter of a world-renowned pianist who survived the Czech concentration camp Theresienstadt and taught his daughter to play each concert as if her life depended on it. But on the night of her Carnegie Hall debut, as Isabel is performing, her parents die in an accident, and Isabel shuts down. She has been playing silently, the cello muted, for over a decade when, a week after arriving in Italy, her elderly teacher and lover dies in their hotel room, leaving her stranded and virtually penniless. Isabel bluffs her way into a job teaching the son of a shady miser millionaire. At the interview, though, she comes to understand that her real task is to play the extraordinary cello he is hiding, a cello stolen by the Nazis from a famous Jewish musician, which never resurfaced.
Giulio Romano is an Italian Jewish surgeon with a complex past of his own. A descendant of the 18th century Paduan Kabbalist Rabbi Luzzatto, Giulio uses his ancestor's erotic philosophy to coax, seduce and provoke Isabel to confront her musical gift. A compulsive performer and liar who moonlights as a part-time prostitute, Giulio turns out to be more genuine than anyone Isabel has ever known. As he persuades her to perform again, she enables him to finally stop performing.
READ THE FIRST CHAPTER