Music for the Third Ear

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Summary: An unforgettable tale of human need, love and selfishness
Review: 'Music for the Third Ear' is a deceptively simple and quick book. But it lingers, it doesn't go away, and it keeps you thinking about it long afterwards. There are so many levels that meet or careen into each other... It is an extremely saddening book, with no happy ending, and barely a ray of hope. It is pessimistic, as many of the characters are sucked down into and feed on their own vortexes of hate or need. It is a violent protest about man's inhumanity to man, and what to depths our egocentricity allows us to stoop---Mette feels all she does is OK because she is childless; Mesud rides on a cloud of ethnic hate that becomes its own reason to exist and be nurtured; Dr. lo Schiavo has no qualms about removing love and trust in the name of 'charity' and 'humanity', and so on. The only truly innocent one is as always the child, who might be the eternal loser.

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Summary: An Editor's Dream
Review: It is a dream for an editor to stumble upon a first novel of the power and insight of Susan Schwartz Senstad's Music for the Third Ear. As a person who had felt himself Balkaned-out by years of CNN and CBS reportage on the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia and its continuing tragic after-effects, I would not have thought a novel on this topic something I would choose to read. Having read it, I am awed at its human vision of these terrible events and, by extension, of the history of Europe over the past fifty years. Music for the Third Ear is a lean, dramatic, fascinating and frightening novel -- I don't recall being made to feel quite like this by a novel since reading Kosinski's The Painted Bird in the late 1960s. Music for the Third Ear is a fine example of the marriage of two creative disciplines, psychology and fiction, in a powerful novel of human drama. It has already begun to win praise and distinction -- one segment of it was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 1997, and the novel as a whole has been nominated for the Editor's Choice Award as well as having been a semi-finalist in the 1998 William Faulkner Literary Competition judged by Oscar Hijuelos. Excerpts have also been published in Norwegian translation. An American edition is coming in March, 2001 and the book is also being translated into Dutch, Norwegian and German. In my role as Advisory Editor of the American journal, THE LITERARY REVIEW, I chose it to excerpt in TLR's issue, TEN WRITERS WORTH KNOWING. That excerpt went on to win TLR's Charles Angoff Award.

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Summary: Powerful, a must read!
Review: Music for the Third Ear in eerie synchronous plotting seeks to and successfully connects two twentieth century holocausts, the Nazi atrocities and the Yugoslavian. Although fictional, it achieves an immediacy and a depth of understanding, particularly about the victimization of people from the Bosnian War. By putting names, faces, and personal histories in front of us, we can't avoid becoming emotionally involved.

I will just briefly outline the plot here. The details are important, but what lies underneath in meaning is more so. A Yugoslav couple, one a Bosnian Muslim and the other a Croatian Catholic reunite five years after the end of the Bosnia War in Rome. The woman has a son as a result of gang rape during the war, whom her husband forces her to give up to a childless Italian couple. The Yugoslavians immigrate to Norway, where they stay temporarily with a childless couple, the woman being the daughter of Jewish holocaust survivors. The child, in the meantime, has severe psychological problems and eventually becomes a pawn between the Italians, the Yugoslavs, and the Norwegian couple. Each family is already psychologically scarred, some as a result of war, some for other reasons.

The story is told in flashbooks. As we are taken through their lives what becomes painfully evident is that we can only watch, but are powerless to stop another tragedy in the making, even after war is long over. What makes it bearable at all, is the loving insight of the author, a psychotherapist, who tells the story in way that enhances our understanding and never intrudes.

The title is not entirely clear to me, but I gather that it relates to a method of psychotherapy described by the psychoanalyst, Theodore Reik, in which listening, not just with the ears, but with all of one's senses and one's soul, is revelatory and crucial to understanding and healing.

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Summary: Music for theThird Ear and for the Right Time and Place!
Review: Susan Schwartz Senstad could not have written a more timely and powerful work of fiction. The book is about the aftereffects of the rape genocide/ethnic cleansing policies carried about by Slobodon Milosevij on a couple coming back from their ordeal who meet up with a child of Auschwitz survivors, looking to take them in and "fix" what happened to them. .... In this powerful intersection of the Shoah that could not happen again, with the one that has happened and is now being debated--like its predecessor--Schwartz Senstad understands the human need to rid ourselves of survivor guilt, the resilience of the survivors of the Balkans and of other atrocities, and the great silence that, for the victims, is often the only possible response to what has happened to them. In this short and powerful tale, the main character,Zhelijka, a Croation Catholic woman, endures deliberate cruel and constant mass rapes, until she becomes pregnant by an anonymous father. Zhelijka's soon-born son becomes the pivotal character in the story. She calls him "Zero" and despite her strong ties to her child, is finally forced to endure yet another horror--she allows her Muslim husband Mesud to put the child up for adoption. Ultimately, the rejected child re-enters the lives of the four adult characters, Zhelijka and Mesud and Mette (the first-generation holocaust survivor) and her Norwegian husban Hans Olav.A perfect book club book, which manages to transcend its sad moments with emotion writ large and beautifully, a la Alice Walker or Joyce Carol Oates. Destined for the Oprah show! Thanks to Picador, USA for publishing a paperback version that exceeds the beauty of "The Red Tent."

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Summary: Difficult Miracle
Review: Susan Schwartz Senstad examines in unflinching detail the mingling worlds of Nazi Holocaust survivors and survivors of the atrocities in Bosnia. With a sensitive ear for the music of relationships, the fragile harmonies of faith, and the clashing dissonances of war, she creates characters who will not quickly leave your mind - babies held like bundles of laundry, a man with cigarette burn tattoos across his chest, a woman who can't bear to look at her ravaged body, the child Zero clutching his toy pistol.

The situations in which these people find themselves - and the situations they create from their own passions - echo like melodies heard faintly from a distant room; yet, when examined, seem to be coming relentlessly from inside one's own skull.

This is not an easy book, but one that I recommend for its clarity and for the overwhelming tenderness and respect with which Senstad draws her characters. The sensationalism of press coverage is firmly laid to rest as these complex personal histories evolve.

Music for the Third Ear is deeply touching and unforgettable... a miraculous first novel.

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Summary: A novel of remarkable insight
Review: Susan Schwartz Senstad has written a book that deserves attention for several reasons. At one level, it is the sad story of three couples, two childless and one with an unwanted war child, and these couples' attempt to come to terms with their situation; at another level, it is a story about how cultural values and individual psyches interact to create a situation with no prospect of a happy solution. When Zheljka and Masud turn up on the doorstep of the Hans Olav and Mette in Oslo, they unwittingly proceed to break every possible rule of polite behaviour in Norwegian society. The culture clash between the Bosnians and the Norwegians is brilliantly described by Senstad, who manages to get under the skin of her characters and turn them into "real" people to the extent that you come to think of them as "historical" personalities rather than fictional characters. The novel gradually centres on the fate of Zheljka's war child, and the unhappy boy comes to act not only as an object of conflict and desire between the adults, but also as a catalyst serving to expose the cultural biases and psychological forces that direct the actions of the protagonists. It is this complex interplay between suprapersonal and individual factors that makes the novel outstanding. "Music for the Third Ear" is a novel without heroes, with the possible exception of Hans Olav who in the end proves himself a firm and skilled troubleshooter when Mette's actions have landed her in a complete mess. It is above all a novel about the tragedy of war that victimizes the persons that come under its sway and turns them into victimizers. Ms Senstad's book deserves a wide readership. A reader from Oslo

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Summary: Legacy of the War in Bosnia
Review: Susan Schwartz Senstad's riveting novel transcends a half century of history in which the outside world said, "Never again," then looked the other way while tens of thousands of civilians were tortured, killed, and displaced in another European genocide. The author weaves a disturbing tale of a couple who endured unimaginable and unspeakable horrors during the 1992-95 Bosnian ethnic cleansing and their relationship with another refugee victim of an earlier Holocaust, World War II. Susan Schwartz Senstad displays the deft hand of an accomplished novelist and the soul of an empathic family therapist in portraying the characters and the compelling plot. Mette, a well-meaning Norwegian child of Jewish parents, attempts to heal her half century of pain through her well-intentioned efforts to assuage the suffering of more recent survivors, Zheljka and Mesud from Bosnia. Embroiled in the clash of cultures and trauma is an innocent five year old boy, doomed to be the tragic character, whose emotional needs for maternal nurturing can never be fulfilled due to the violent history of his conception. We wish Senstad would wrap up the story in a neat little package with a happy ending of adjustment, forgiveness, and emotional healing. But like the physical and psychic wreckage which still haunts war victims, this expertly written novel has a more unpredictable and realistic ending. The novel is a poignant reminder that the scars of ethnic conflict remain for years after the hostilities end and the treaties are signed. For Americans who watched the Bosnian war from afar and only caught TV glimpses of Sarajevans burning their books and furniture for fuel or news photos of starved and tortured concentration camp victims, Susan Schwartz Senstad vividly brings the aftermath of this brutal conflict into our living rooms, our consciences, and our hearts.

[Bonnie Miller is a psychotherapist, educator, and social worker who has lived in Sarajevo and done humanitarian work all over Bosnia since 1999, collaborating closely with her husband, Tom Miller, U.S. Ambassador to Bosnia & Herzegovina. Among her professional contributions to the healing efforts in BiH are extensive, local language trainings, TV& radio programs as well as guidebooks for educators and parents.] Bonnie Miller, [e-mail]

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Summary: Music for theThird Ear and for the Right Time and Place!
Review: The book burns, numbs, burns. The people are real. The history is real. "It was History she ran from," the author tells us, we who are prone to forget or deny, "and, to her, there was no stalker more tenacious, no trapper so cunning: its favorite victims are those who survive."

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Summary: Amazing story
Review: This mesmerizing book tells the interconnecting stories of a Balkan war refugee family, the Norwegian family that gives them refuge, and a childless Italian couple. You hear the stories through a number of different characters and get a real feel for each of them. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you won't be able to put the book down, and you'll never be quite the same again. This is a remarkable first novel that says, "No more war" in a simple, powerful way. As written on the book jacket of the British edition of the book, "Between the lines the reader hears echoes of how each of us struggles with our own acts of betrayal, our tenderness, our vulnerability." I can't wait for her next book!