| THE
NEW YORK TIMES
October 13, 2002
Books in Brief: Fiction
DISTURBANCE OF THE INNER EAR
by Joyce Hackett.
Carroll & Graf, $25
Isabel Masurovsky, the narrator of ''Disturbance of the Inner Ear,''
Joyce Hackett's strange and intermittently lovely first novel, is
a onetime child prodigy, a brilliant cellist who has been artistically
blocked for a decade. When Isabel was 14, on the night of her Carnegie
Hall debut, her parents died in a car crash. She hasn't played well
since. She awakens on the book's first page in a Milan hotel to discover
that her septuagenarian lover, the only person who remembers her illustrious
past, has died. Stranded in Italy with no family, little money and
an exceedingly delicate temperament (she finds the crunching required
to eat an apple unendurably violent), Isabel proceeds to make a series
of mysterious and haphazard choices. She begins an uneasy romance
with a surgical resident who sidelines as a gigolo, and takes work
tutoring a troubled adolescent boy with a taste for dog biscuits.
The boy's father owns an exquisite 16th-century cello, the same instrument,
Isabel suspects, that was confiscated by the Nazis from a famous Jewish
musician. Isabel is powerfully drawn to the cello, which, like her,
hasn't made music in years. The Holocaust casts its long shadow over
them both: Isabel's father, a pianist and a concentration camp survivor,
has left his daughter a legacy of crushing anxiety. When she was a
child, he told her ''that bad people crumbled if they heard Beethoven
or Bach,'' and that only her musical virtuosity would protect her.
The novel is breathless, opaque and hard to track; it is also singular
and sometimes haunting.
JENNIFER MARIE REESE |