The Hearing Test (a Novel)
MARCH 5 2024
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Hardcover | $27.00
Published by Catapult
Mar 05, 2024 | 5 x 8 | ISBN 9781646222131
PRAISE for The HEARING Test
"Breathtakingly crafted [...] Callahan’s synesthetic language troubles the distinctions between senses"
—Katy Waldman, The New Yorker
"★★★★★ - Psychological ekphrasis."
—Kate Simpson, The Telegraph
“Both meditative and deliciously funny . . . masterfully-observed.”
—Keziah Weir, Vanity Fair
“This is a deeply moving meditation on life and loss—a stunning debut.”
—Yvonne C. Garrett, The Brooklyn Rail
“Pitch-perfect . . . Callahan achieves something here that you might call grace.”
—Hannah Regel, Jacobin
“Callahan debuts a magnificent stream-of-consciousness narrative portraying a young New York City artist as her hearing deteriorates . . . A bracing immersion into the world of the senses.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“A writer of unusual talents and profound preoccupations: a literary newcomer to watch.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“[A] quietly electrifying debut . . . This is a special novel with a style reminiscent of Magda Szabó’s The Door and whose commitment to making sense of everyday existence calls to mind Tom McCarthy’s Remainder.”
—Booklist (starred review)
A young woman’s sudden hearing loss initiates and propels The Hearing Test. But affliction is also a catalyst for the many irresistible twists and digressions that make this novel of dérive so compelling. Callahan never explains; with steely reserve she observes and chronicles, makes ingenious, delirious connections and transitions, and takes us on a journey through her cultural mindscape of artists, writers, cinema and music, and offers it up with muted irony and a limpid grace. Her characters are not just the anointed; The Hearing Test is full of verbatim conversation with neighbors, family and strangers, that reads like poetry. The novel has a fly-on-the-wall quality of noting, listing, transcribing -- and finally containment, of making narrative out of life’s accidents. The Hearing Test is ecstatic prose. I finished Callahan’s novel and went right back to page one, my habit now with the books I love.
—Moyra Davey, artist and author of Index Cards
An artist suffering from sudden hearing loss finds herself even more sensitive to the lives of others, observing neighbors and the absurdities of the city, always punctuated by art and literary gossip. This debut work by Eliza Callahan is an extraordinary piece of literature, to be read alongside the novels of W.G. Sebald, Rachel Cusk, and Maria Gainza.
—Kate Zambreno, author of Drifts
“Eerie and tender and utterly consuming, The Hearing Test has built an entirely new world from the materials of the one we know. It takes you to a restaurant called the void, Il Vuoto, and serves you its primal, beguiling sustenance: a nourishment of pauses, estrangement, and bewilderment. The voice here is wise and wry and wondering; in its fresh and faltering silences are frequencies I’ve never heard before. From the first paragraph, I knew I wanted to keep reading Eliza Barry Callahan forever.”
—Leslie Jamison, author of Splinters and The Empathy Exams
In this striking novel, ‘controlled panic’ gives way to a cool remove when a young artist suddenly goes deaf. Silence, for her, ‘is dressed as an injury,’ but it is also the point of entry into the lives of other creators, and philosophers. Elegant and startling, The Hearing Test is a contemplative gem.
—Amy Hempel, author of Sing To It
Not for a while have I read a book by a writer new to me, and felt so much toward it so fast. The Hearing Test takes up fragility, sound and silence, solitude, the unknown, and the self in relation to others with a light, yet serious touch. I’ve found a new favorite.
—Amina Cain, author of Indelicacy
An original, extraordinarily vivid book [...], The Hearing Test is an invigorating study of the beauty and possibilities of language and representation.
—Holly Connolly, AnOther Magazine
The Hearing Test is a story moulded by acts of translation, by the joyously generative leaps a mind must make to form sense from a world that refuses to stop giving, even when common practices of being threaten oblivion. As sound begins fail, the elastic mind of Eliza Barry Callahan’s narrator grips towards pleasure, opening for the reader too, new territory wide and strange enough to require transition from the practice of simply living, to the practice of flaming discovery. This book is love and ingenuity unravelling with wicked brilliance.
—Helen Marten, artist and author of The Boiled in Between
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