'The music emerging from under her hands has an eloquence of a child's song, but one proceeding from an angelic source. Her head bends back, her mouth opens slightly to receive it. Someone, something, is speaking to her and through her. By the end of the great sonata, an enormous and gentle panorama has been traversed; a complex geometry of silent thought has been outlined and has come to its completion.'

Further musical insights are offered in the form of a diary kept by the composer Wolfe, one-time teacher to Isabel. She's carrying the book with her as she travels the world, and dips into it from time to time, providing us with a sometimes compelling counterpoint to the third-person voice that narrates (in an irritating perpetual present tense) Isabel's story. When Wolfe lets us in on his musical daydreams, the effect is brilliant, hypnotic: 'Last night, a dream � a nightmare � of a sound. Nothing more than a sound, and yet it had all awe, all terror in it.' This is heady stuff. Hoffman isn't afraid to go for the metaphysical, and that in itself commands respect. But the musical musings become repetitive after awhile, as do the perfectly calibrated evocations of this city or that, this airport or that. Perhaps this monotony is intentional, and in itself might work as a device, were there only something beyond to gather our attention.

This something is clearly meant to be the doomed love affair between Isabel and homeless Chechen rebel/intellectual Anzor. The problem is, I don't believe any of it. I don't believe in Anzor's mission, I don't believe in Isabel's passion for him, I don't even believe any of these people ever existed. They are just 'indicating'. I see that Hoffman has studied psychoanalysis, and this also shows. She gives Anzor a nasty father (he even kills the boy's dog) so he can have a 'reason' to hate authority. She gives Isabel a muddled past that doesn't ever quite add up, but there's a broken home, a mother who seems to be emotionally absent, and a sad little brother who dies young of a drug overdose. The only time I believed any of this was a single passage of remembered pain, when she is walking with her small brother somewhere in the south of France and, although only a child herself, attempts to comfort him for the lack of maternal affection. But most of the time it's hooey.

Rather bothersome, as well, is the way the novel never places Isabel securely in time. Just how old is she supposed to be? This sort of thing does make a difference to our understanding of her. She's described as beautiful and elegant, without any hints as to the ravages of age, so one must assume her to be, at the most, little over thirty. Her career is still on the upward swing, another indication of relative youth. The only actual date in the book is 1982, the date of Wolfe's �Journal of a Summer�, in which she features as a lissom teenaged genius. But how old is she then? Sixteen perhaps? Eighteen? That would make her forty-four! At one point she remembers the moon landing quite clearly � that was in 1969, so if our heroine were ten years old at the time she would now be nearly fifty! Surely too mature for such shenanigans, such naivet�. Oddly, she never sends an e-mail, and despite the fact she's perpetually phoning her Ex in New York, doesn't seem to own a mobile phone. What world is she living in? I don't think Hoffman has thought through the challenges of re-positioning her consciousness inside a woman of a later generation than herself (she was born in 1946.) These are details, admittedly, but they do prickle and annoy, and ultimately contribute to the overall air of implausibility.

I see that Hoffman has written previously in the non-fiction genre � her accounts of life in a Polish village, and of her experiences as an immigrant child are highly regarded. She has a keen mind, and her analysis of the emptiness, terror and despair that often afflict the modern western consciousness are acute. But musical intelligence, lyrical prose, and a lot of observations about unhappiness do not make a novel. Kafka once said that a book should be like 'an axe to the frozen sea of the heart'. Perhaps if she finds the courage to take up that axe someday, Hoffman may yet give us a fine novel.

Grace Andreacchi was born and raised in New York City, but has lived on the far side of the great ocean for many years - sometimes in Paris, sometimes Berlin, and nowadays in London. Works include the novels Give my Heart Ease,(New American Writing Award), and Music for Glass Orchestra, the play Vegetable Medley (Soho Repertory Theater, New York and Boston Center for the Arts, Boston, Massachusetts)and the chapbook Elysian Sonnets and Other Poems. Her short stories and poetry appear regularly in both on-line and print journals including Carolina Quarterly, Pen Pusher, Eclectica, and Laura Hird Showcase and her non-fiction in Her Circle Ezine and Laura Hird Showcase. Visit her website here.