DISTURBANCE OF THE INNER EAR

In a startling, memorable debut, a waning cellist prodigy is doomed to relive the trauma of her Holocaust survivor father 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 Milwaukee 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 again alone in the world when her elderly maestro and lover, Signor Perso, dies in his sleep in their pension room in Milan. Literally lifted 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.