At its best, fiction remakes the world, turning what we think we know totally upside down. That’s the case in Rosenfeld’s imaginative debut novel. . . . An utterly original take on self-perception and perception.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review
“Synaesthetic and metaphorically acute. [Louise] forges her own way, flirting with erasure and transformation, before arriving at a decision that is hers alone to make. Jellyfish Have No Ears is a profound novel.”—Michelle Anne Schingler, Foreword Reviews
“An immersive and surreal tale of a 20-something woman grappling with hearing loss. . . . Rosenfeld artfully depicts Louise’s singular reality.”—Publishers Weekly
“A curious, thought-provoking, intensely mind-bending exploration of the loss of a sense and the potential richness as well as struggle of life with an invisible disability. Imaginative and spellbinding, Jellyfish Have No Ears is unforgettable.” —Julia Kastner, Shelf Awareness
"Will a cochlear implant change the way one unforgettable young woman experiences the world? Adèle Rosenfeld's narrator grapples with this question as she navigates work, love, and her own unruly imagination. In lush, startling prose, made vivid by Jeffrey Zuckerman's translation, her agonizing choice becomes relevant to us all.”—Nell Freudenberger
“Unexpectedly, Adèle Rosenfeld’s marvelous novel turns out to be about sounds: fans whirring, sneakers squeaking, cars honking, motorcycles thrumming, but most of all voices making noises that are frustratingly but fascinatingly misunderstood. In Jeffrey Zuckerman’s translation, this account of imperfect hearing will take its readers by surprise and teach them new ways of listening.” —Anne Fadiman
“Every mishearing spawns a fiction: the hearer invents words, ideas, and stories to fill in the breaks in communication. Adèle Rosenfeld’s brilliant novel rigorously pursues the literary potential of this idea, as her narrator navigates an alternately painful, playful, and hallucinatory linguistic universe that unspools from the growing gaps in her hearing. Jeffrey Zuckerman’s marvelous translation of Jellyfish Have No Ears is a complex, funny, and deeply valuable chronicle of ‘someone uprooted from language’ as she wrestles with the alienation, ambiguity, denial, and possibility that emerge from her new states of being.” —Andrew Leland
★ 2024-05-17
A beguiling, whisper-thin novel about a woman losing her hearing.
At its best, fiction remakes the world, turning what we think we know totally upside down. That’s the case in Rosenfeld’s imaginative debut novel. Louise is totally deaf in one ear, with limited hearing in the other. When her hearing suddenly gets even worse, she needs to decide whether she’s going to get a cochlear implant. At times absurd, but mostly poignant and inventive, the book is really about making sense of the world, exploring the gaps between perception and cognition. To Louise, who has lost her ability to hear middle-low frequencies, language becomes pure sound (“the warmth of timbres”) and touch (“this soft sheen of wind”) and even many senses mixed together (“all sound’s snags and snarls”). Her hearing makes her vulnerable, as she studies people’s lips, tries to snatch words from the world’s din, guesses, and often mishears. In a restaurant, she thinks, “There was a chalkboard on which I was the hangman. ‘F_ _ _ S H _ D?’ the waiter was asking me.” When her hearing keeps worsening, “the monster crouching deep in my ear…gorging on more and more words,” she and her boyfriend communicate in the bathtub, her boyfriend at one end speaking into the water, and she at the other, her good ear resting on the surface of the water, absorbing the vibrations. The book is also a perceptive meditation on identity, with Louise stuck in a kind of “no-man’s-land,” as her doctor puts it, having “built a life as a hearing person” but with the “all the same problems as any deaf person.” The question of who she is becomes more acute as she worries about how an implant might change her: “Would I recognize my mother’s voice…my own voice?” In quietly dazzling prose, Rosenfeld captures what we know but haven’t really seen, what we’ve heard but haven’t quite registered.
An utterly original take on self-perception and perception.
