Jellyfish Have No Ears - by Adèle Rosenfeld (Paperback)

About the Book

A deeply moving debut novel about the flaws of language, the fear of silence, and the power of imagination

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"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

"Utterly riveting. . . . It's an experiential work in a way few novels are."--Tobias Carroll, Words Without Borders

"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

"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

"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

"Spectacular. . . . Zuckerman's craft shines, as he translated not just content, but phonemes to evoke Louise's lipreading. . . . From hearing to listening, Jellyfish Have No Ears is ultimately a powerful, necessary meditation on the connections formed through silence."--Elizabeth McNeill, Chicago Review of Books

"It's possible to hear without listening. In fact, it's something people do often, as Adèle Rosenfeld's brilliant debut novel, Jellyfish Have No Ears, makes clear. By comparison, the sonic world of Louise, her young French protagonist, is richly textured, precisely because it isn't cohesive. . . . And while what Louise will gain from the operation is unknown, what she currently has can be unimaginably gorgeous."--Katherine Waters, The Telegraph (UK)

"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