Kirkus Reviews
August
1, 2002
I Starred Review I
HHackett, Joyce
DISTURBANCE OF THE INNER EAR
Carroll & Graf (288 pp.)
$25.00
Oct. 2002
ISBN: 0-7867-1046-2
In a startling,
memorable debut, a waning cellist prodigy is doomed to relive
the trauma of her Holocaust survivor 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
New Jersey, 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 alone
in the world when her elderly maestro and lover, Signor Perso,
dies in his sleep in their pension room in Milan. Literally liftes 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.