Book Review - Jellyfish Have No Ears

Adèle Rosenfeld’s striking debut novel — which was a finalist for the prestigious Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman in France in 2022 — explores what it is like to live with an invisible disability. Louise F is partially deaf and exists in a sensory limbo: “Not deaf enough to be a part of Deaf culture, not hearing enough to be fully within the hearing world.” When tests reveal she has lost a further 15 decibels, Louise is offered the opportunity to have a cochlear implant. But the operation is irreversible, meaning the loss of her natural hearing: “The warmth of timbres, this soft sheen of wind, of colour, of all sound’s snags and snarls.” 

As Louise considers her options, she muses on her ongoing struggle to understand and be understood. Even an encounter with a waiter in a restaurant is fraught with anxiety: “There was a chalkboard on which I was the hangman: ‘F_ _ _ SH_D?’ the waiter was asking me.” She is employed by a local government office because she helps them meet their disability quota. After informing her colleagues that she needed to lip-read she observes “it was nothing short of poetic that I needed light to hear. That was, until they had to repeat what had already been said more than twice: all the poetic-ness went to pieces, and I went from poet to idiot.” 

Largely based on Rosenfeld’s personal experience and deftly translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman (who himself had a cochlear implant in 1995), there is wry humour in Louise’s aural misunderstandings and in how she occasionally exploits her condition by turning off her hearing aid when people bore her or the traffic noise becomes overwhelming. The title alludes to a jellyfish’s ability to survive without ears and Louise uses similar means to communicate with her boyfriend in the bath: “The reverberation of sound from his mouth travelled across the surface . . . vibrations alone enveloped us. In those moments I was Thomas’s voice, and he mine, and I felt like nothing would disappear.” In a music bar, she discovers Thomas’s friend has adapted John Coltrane’s Blue Train to her aural range. 

Louise’s contradictory impulses are lyrically evoked: “I was used to the darkness of silence, but I couldn’t forget about the part of me that was hearing.” She worries that an implant will indelibly change her or that she will no longer recognise her mother’s voice. “I imagined hearing myself as an unfamiliar voice, inhabited by someone else, being torn asunder on the inside, as if centuries had gone by in the same street without any sign, any trace.” 

When one sense is impaired, there is often a neural reorganisation in the brain. For Louise, her imagination is heightened as she communes in her head with “spectres of trauma” — a soldier from the first world war, a one-eyed dog and a botanist who she conjures, in a surreal twist, while existing in a state of limbo. 

Threading philosophical and medical reflections through the narrative, Rosenfeld perceptively illuminates Louise’s inner world. Jellyfish Have No Ears is a profound, sometimes playful, meditation on deafness and the impact sensory loss has on human relationships. 

Originally published by The Financial Times