Book Review

In the first two lines of her debut novel Jellyfish Have No Ears, published by Graywolf Press, Adèle Rosenfeld reveals that nothing in her story is as it seems. Her narrator Louise’s mix-up, “It was the Castaigne building. What I’d heard was Castagne,” introduces a central theme of the book: What Louise hears is not what is. Rosenfeld signals a surreal story told by an unreliable narrator, full of misunderstandings, and blurs between reality and fiction. Yet with this opening line, she invites us to swim along with her, or perhaps get carried away, in the current of her imagination.

Translated from its original French by Jeffrey Zuckerman, this gorgeously weird novel follows Louise as she navigates a stereotypical world for young women: worries of love, career, and family. She’s found a job she doesn’t like but pays the bills, attends a sex party and falls in love, fights with her mother, and has a friend who encourages her to live a little more, but tends to hold her back. The twist that makes this potentially clichéd story worth reading is that Louise navigates all of this normal chaos with a disability that is all her own.

For as long as she can remember, Louise has been “uprooted from language,” hearing just “the skeletons of sounds.” She is not entirely deaf, but cannot be trusted to hear, either. Worse still, Louise is rapidly losing what little hearing she has left, and must decide whether or not to get a cochlear implant. If she does, her unique way of hearing the world, including her invention of three imaginary characters, who sometimes help and often hinder her, will be lost.

Oh, yes: There are imaginary characters in this story. Accompanying Louise on her coming-of-age journey are a one-eyed dog, a World War I soldier who acts as a stand-in boyfriend, and botanist-psychiatrist. The three of them cause even more chaos for Louise, embodying the constant background noises that ring in her ears, which do interfere with her everyday life. The dog barks and nibbles at Louise, the botanist’s odd advice isolates Louise even further, and the imaginary boyfriend . . . well, I’m sure you can imagine how that could be emotionally damaging.

In Jellyfish Have No Ears, it seems clear to everyone except Louise (and her imaginary friends) that her hearing loss negatively impacts her life. Louise is anxious, finds it difficult to leave the house, and quite literally hears things that are not there. And yet, she still hesitates to get a cochlear implant, as much as readers may want to grab her by the shoulders and shake some sense into her. Louise frankly does not care to make a decision at all: She would rather be by herself “at the top of some mountain in the Himalayas wrestling with a little can of tuna” instead of in the real world.

The “real world,” to Louise, is inaccessible, and thus undesirable to her. With her condition, Louise feels more of a connection to the natural world, specifically ecosystems where her hearing does not matter. At a trip to the aquarium, Louise reflects:

I felt like a jellyfish, floating amid so much with no visibility. An oyster served as transition to the human ear . . . The illuminated label explained that oysters responded to hearing tests performed by a research team by snapping shut, especially at lower frequencies . . . I could relate.

Louise empathizes with fish, oysters, and jellyfish, who have no ears at all. If she were to choose for her ear to be “reupholstered in metal,” her connection to this world, and her natural hearing, would be lost forever.

Even in a story as unprecedented as this, there were some blanket disability statements, such as “I felt like I’d been plopped down, without any instructions or guidance, in a society that needed me to be exactly like every other citizen and find my place and do my job.” Out of context here, these words seem blunt and removed from the story. These remarks don’t overwhelm the narrative, which is quirky enough to make these statements work; instead they balance each other out. This helps especially when Rosenfeld’s descriptive work is so fresh, in both its beauty and humor: Whether she compares a doctor putting headphones on her ears to “placing electrodes on a chicken’s head,” or describes further hearing loss, which felt like “a long slow-motion avalanche was burying all my points of reference: the monster crouching deep in my ear was gorging on more and more words.” Though, how she sees her ears is not static; Louise further describes the idea that “a tree could be tucked into my ear, digging its roots deep into my auditory system and extending beyond the cartilaginous rim that was called a helix, straining towards the light.”

Through these descriptions, Rosenfeld invites us to challenge our perceptions of disability, and get lost in this world. We don’t know what’s real or not—neither does Louise—and that’s the point. To me, that’s what makes this book delightful. Readers must let go and trust Rosenfeld to bring them a good story. Perhaps the authors themselves can relate to this disorientedness as well: Adèle Rosenfeld is partially deaf, and translator Jeffrey Zuckerman received a cochlear implant.

Zuckerman deserves a world of credit for his translation of Jellyfish Have No Ears. He had to translate both from French and how one hears when they cannot hear. For example, he translates Louise hearing the phrase ‘hello, have a seat’ as the phonetic “Elo avazit,” which would be completely different in French (Bonjour, asseyez-vous). In a more tangible example, he offers, “The word ‘implant’ was a one-two punch: the jab of the first syllable, a brief inhale, then the uppercut of the lips forcing out a p followed by the sight of the tongue’s blue-veined underside and the quick exhale of the second syllable.” Zuckerman’s lived experience, and writing talents, really bring this book to life.

Throughout this novel, Louise, an unreliable narrator through no fault of her own, demonstrates what it’s like to come of age in a disabled body, to come to terms with yourself in the process, all the while with a wicked sense of humor. In the end, Louise does make her choice. The journey to that choice, through the surreal world of Rosenfeld’s imagination, is one of confusion, drama, heartache and longing, but also one of profound beauty, and lessons in love. It is a journey worth taking.