The Hearing Test
A Novel
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4.3 • 4 Ratings
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
Finalist for the Young Lions Fiction Award
Longlisted for the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction
A Dakota Johnson x TeaTime Book Club Pick
A young woman reorients her relationship to the world in the wake of sudden deafness in this mesmerizing debut novel for readers of Rachel Cusk, Clarice Lispector, and Fleur Jaeggy
When the narrator of The Hearing Test, an artist in her late twenties, awakens one morning to a deep drone in her right ear, she is diagnosed with Sudden Deafness, but is offered no explanation for its cause. As the specter of total deafness looms, she keeps a record of her year—a score of estrangement and enchantment, of luck and loneliness, of the chance occurrences to which she becomes attuned—while living alone in a New York City studio apartment with her dog.
Through a series of fleeting and often humorous encounters—with neighbors, an ex-lover, doctors, strangers, family members, faraway friends, and with the lives and works of artists, filmmakers, musicians, and philosophers—making meaning becomes a form of consolation and curiosity, a form of survival.
At once a rumination on silence and a novel on seeing, The Hearing Test is a work of vitalizing intellect and playfulness which marks the arrival of a major new literary writer with a rare command of form, compression, and intent.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Callahan debuts with a magnificent stream-of-consciousness narrative portraying a young New York City artist as her hearing deteriorates. The unnamed narrator wakes one August morning to a droning in her right ear that causes everything to sound distorted. After a hearing test, she is diagnosed with sudden deafness and referred to a series of specialists. The narrator's diaristic account of more tests, hypnotherapy, clinical trials, and her declining hearing over the ensuing months is shaped by her various relationships and changing circumstances. In October, she receives a visit from her unnamed ex-boyfriend, who wants to say goodbye to the dog they once shared before he moves to Los Angeles. In November, she calls a friend of her mother's who's dying from cancer and tells the friend it's "terrible she would die at ," to which the friend jokingly replies she'd "rather die than go deaf." The narrator finds solace on hearing loss forums, where many people report hearing the same "phantom songs" ("Amazing Grace," "Silent Night," "The Star-Spangled Banner"), and ruminates in beautiful prose on the idea of silence ("Being in the presence of things made me more aware of the way I was experiencing their absence—everything existed in a silhouette"). It adds up to a bracing immersion into the world of the senses.
Customer Reviews
*5-Star Read*
Loved it! Thoughtful, empathetic, original; and very smart. Takes a lot to get me to read something that doesn't have a European weirdo solving unspeakable murders - accessible and atmospheric, this one was well worth the change of pace. Terrific.