Keynote
A deeply moving debut novel about the flaws of language, the fear of silence, and the power of imagination
Book Title
Jellyfish Have No Ears
Subtitle
A Novel
Cover Image
- A Kirkus Best Debut Fiction and Best Fiction in Translation Book of 2024
A Words Without Borders Best Book of 2024
Body
Since she was little, Louise has been not quite hearing and not quite deaf—her life with this invisible disability has been one of in-betweenness. After an audiology test shows that almost all her hearing is gone, her doctor suggests getting a cochlear implant. The operation will be irreversible, making the decision all the more fraught. The technology would give Louise a new sense of hearing—but it would be at the expense of her natural hearing, which, for all its weakness, has shaped her unique relationship with the world, full of whispers and shadows.
Hearing, for Louise, is inseparable from reading other people’s lips. Through sight, she perceives words and strings them together like pearls to reconstruct a conversation. But when the string breaks, misunderstandings result and eccentric images fill her thoughts. As she weighs the prospect of surgery, fabulous characters begin to accompany her: a damaged soldier from the First World War, an irritable dog named Cirrus, and a whimsical botanist. This ethereal world, full of terror and beauty and off-kilter humor, keeps erupting into the equally chaotic reality of Louise’s life as she experiences a new relationship, suffers through her first job, and steadies herself with friends.
With Jellyfish Have No Ears, Adèle Rosenfeld shines an extraordinary light on the black hole of losing a sense and on the vibrancy that can arise to fill the void.
Hearing, for Louise, is inseparable from reading other people’s lips. Through sight, she perceives words and strings them together like pearls to reconstruct a conversation. But when the string breaks, misunderstandings result and eccentric images fill her thoughts. As she weighs the prospect of surgery, fabulous characters begin to accompany her: a damaged soldier from the First World War, an irritable dog named Cirrus, and a whimsical botanist. This ethereal world, full of terror and beauty and off-kilter humor, keeps erupting into the equally chaotic reality of Louise’s life as she experiences a new relationship, suffers through her first job, and steadies herself with friends.
With Jellyfish Have No Ears, Adèle Rosenfeld shines an extraordinary light on the black hole of losing a sense and on the vibrancy that can arise to fill the void.
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About the Author
Credit: ©JFPAGA
Praise
- “Rosenfeld is partially deaf and has found a perceptive translator in Jeffrey Zuckerman, who is deaf and has drawn on a ‘lifetime of lip-reading’ . . . to carry the book’s puns and misreadings into vibrant English. “This holey language will never be deciphered completely,’ Louise thinks, and the homophone ‘holey’ is shrewd, as the gaps in her reality give her an air of oddball mysticism. . . . A note of comic bewilderment recurs throughout Louise’s passage along the broken shore of coherence, and the question is just how far into the tide of static she’ll allow herself to drift.”—Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
- “A Parisian woman, growing increasingly deaf, contemplates the self, her body and artificial hearing as she considers a cochlear implant.”—The New York Times Book Review
- “Jellyfish Have No Ears is a literary marvel that brings light to the experience of hearing loss with generosity, curiosity, and enlightening prose.”—Michael Welch, Chicago Review of Books
- “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
