Disturbance of the Inner Ear [Hardcover]

Joyce Hackett is a sculptural writer. She obviously knows her music - both technically and the repertoire - and she uses this information to create a novel that continues to surprise until the final page. This is a story about what we inherit from our parents, be that talent, guilt, revenge, vendetta, remorse, hunger for joy, or just the need to be, to survive. The narrator of this finely honed novel is Isabel whose father survived the Nazi camp of Theresienstadt where he had wisely survived through his gifts as a pianist as a part of the orchestra that played as Jews and other unwanted people arrived at what they believed to be a Spa, discovering once inside that it was an extermination camp. Yuri (Isabel's father) escaped death, but not before his musically gifted fingers were crushed by a guard on the day of freedom. Yuri concentrates all of his rage and frustration having escaped to Milwauakee, WI to raise his daughter,Isabel, a prodigy of the cello. He drives his daughter to extremes of performance, always reminding her of the price paid for her gift. After her successful Carnegie Hall debut her parents are killed in an accident and Isabel is unable to continue playing the cello. She is alone except for her elderly mentor who takes her as his protege and lover to Milan, Italy. There he dies and Isabel sets out to survive on her own. She soon finds employment as a tutor in a large house owned by an eccentric millionaire who demands his son be taught the cello on a rare Amati cello. Isabel's sole contact with the outside world is a plastic surgeon (Guilio) who has as strange a mental hisory as does Isabel. Through a long series of incidents, Isabel finally travels to Theresienstadt to end her tie with her father's past, intending to burn her invaluable cello in the ovens that threatened her father. "Because what Yuri lost was not two parents, or two fingers, not a musical community or a continent. What Yuri lost was a way of trusting the world, the ability to imagine that the world's immense silence contained any sort of listening. What Yuri lost was the possibility of God." "Husbanding my talent was his way of making order out of chaos."
DISTURBANCES OF THE INNER EAR sensitively evokes the traits we inherit form our parents and how we learn to cope with what our history and our contemporary life have dealt us. Isabel finds passion - physical, erotic meaning to exisiting - and embraces that passion in carving her euology for all that was in her past. At the site of Theresienstadt she once again performs for the survivors and the children of survivors the Messiaen "Quartet for the End of Time", the piece that had been her last performance at Carnegie Hall and Messiaen's utterance he wrote for the inmates of the camps. And she rises like a phoenix from that experience.

Joyce Hackett writes beautifully. Reading her book takes concentration as she has written without quotation marks, she melds the past and the present in one sentence and paragraph, and at times pushes her musical knowledge to the point of overindulgence of metaphor. Yet she has written one of the more intense and sensitive memoirs about the Holocaust. A reader recommended this book to me after reading my review of WG Sebald's "Austerlitz" and now I know why. A very fine book.

I have to admit I didn't manage to actually read this book. It's virtually unreadable and I gave up after a dozen or so pages.
I was attracted by the cover (gullible fool), and good words from Hilary Mantel on the back. I love the 'cello and I've had an inner ear problem, so it seemed a good bet!
But it wasn't going anywhere for me, it seemed confused and Hackett's use of language is abysmal, with no proper speech marks so you never quite know who is speaking. Add to that appaling Americanisms like 'gotten' and...well you get my drift! There's a vulnerability in the heroine which I found too much like a attack of vertigo, maybe that's the aim. It's just amazing the rubbish that gets published!

The writing is certainly intense, the character of Isabel is cleverly constructed and her aimless isolation is effective and sympathetically drawn.

I think this is, at times, a very self-conscious novel which lays out its musical metaphors with a heavy hand.