If you lose your hearing, how does the world around you change? What contours of one-on-one conversations become harder to make out, what details of a bustling room come into sharper focus? What creature comforts do you stubbornly cling to all the while?
These are the questions that translator Jeffrey Zuckerman pondered as he translated French author Adèle Rosenfeld’s Jellyfish Have No Ears, an intimate, wonderfully imaginative exploration of identity, sound and silence.
Louise, a young woman in Paris, is caught in the liminal zone between the hearing and the deaf. She’s lived with partial deafness her whole life, and things are getting worse. At the start of the novel, she’s completely deaf in one ear and depends on a hearing aid — which only picks up higher-pitched sounds — for the other.
Her doctor suggests a cochlear implant, a procedure that could improve her hearing but would also permanently cut off what little natural hearing she has left. For Louise, this medical decision is a deeply personal one that forces her to question how she sees herself and interacts with the world around her.
In an audiology test, sounds crash against her dead eardrum. “The lingering trace of words was reduced to a presence. I sat once again in the chair that faced the office to assess the damage on the audiogram. I took careful note of the concave curve on the paper, a tight grid of x and y lines quantifying the remaining sound. It was like a bird’s-eye view of the Normandy coast: the tide of silence was now covering more than half the page.”
Rosenfeld’s description of Louise’s auditory experience is vivid. Deafness is not silence but rather a cacophony of internal noise: the rhythmic drumbeat of her pulse, the static of psychoacoustic distortion, and the fragments of sound that leave her guessing at meanings.
“Amid the background noise of the bus home, I tried to isolate the tyres’ screech, the engine’s whine, the cars’ honking, the voices, the shrill cries. I narrowed my focus on these irregular breaks, these gaps in meaning. The shrill barrages met thrumming. Hacking and slashing my way through, I cleared enough space around a rhythmic sound pattern that I deduced had to be a conversation between two people.”
A simple conversation becomes a high-stakes game, with Louise piecing together words from lip-reading and context, often with bizarre results. In one scene, her mother’s voice cuts out mid-sentence, leaving Louise to interpret fragments as “bear’s garlic”. As vowels fade, understanding is left to mere chance. The absurdity of these moments exposes Louise’s alienation — not deaf enough to be a part of deaf culture, not hearing enough to be in the hearing world. Did the void in her come from that, she asks.
Her deteriorating hearing triggers the emergence of surreal “miraginary” companions: a wounded World War 1 soldier, a one-eyed dog and a botanist who rambles about fictional plants. These vivid manifestations of her isolation and her brain’s attempt to fill the void are as whimsical as they are unsettling. The melancholy of the soldier, a stand-in for a romantic partner, mirrors her own internal struggles. The dog, half-seeing and half-blind, neither entirely human nor fully animal embodies her sense of otherness — a creature that doesn’t quite fit.
Partially deaf herself, Rosenfeld, enlivens Louise’s experiences through an authentic narrative rich with metaphor. She likens her hearing loss to a slow avalanche burying her points of reference, or a tree taking root in her ear, its branches stretching towards the light. She invites readers to rethink the nature of hearing and listening, and the critical distinction between the two.
The novel also explores the societal challenges that come with living with a disability in a world that demands conformity. During a job interview, Louise struggles to lip-read because the interviewer’s face is hidden, leaving her to guess at words like “summer” or “paper”. Similarly, her attempts to learn French sign language expose another layer of exclusion. Her instructor, who identifies as capital-D Deaf, views her as an outsider — a defector from the oral world — once again leaving her stranded in a no-man’s-land.
For all its weighty themes, Jellyfish Have No Ears is full of humour and warmth. Rosenfeld’s wit shines through in Louise’s eccentric interactions with her make-believe companions and her wry take on life’s absurdities. The tone is one of comic bewilderment in the face of profound questions about identity and belonging.
Translator Zuckerman does an excellent job capturing this mix, preserving the wordplay and lyricism of the original text. His own experience with hearing loss adds another layer of depth, particularly in moments in which he translates Louise’s phonetic misunderstandings into English, such as rendering “hello, have a seat” as “elo avazit”.
The title of the book is itself a metaphor for Louise’s journey. At the National Museum of Natural History, she learns that jellyfish, despite having no ears, can perceive their environment through organs akin to the senses of sight and balance. Both comforting and unsettling, the idea resonates with her. She too is constantly adapting, shaped by what she’s lost and what she’s gained.
Thought-provoking and deeply moving, the novel explores the dualities of presence and absence, silence and sound, hearing and listening, while refusing to offer easy resolutions.
Louise’s decision about the cochlear implant is left open-ended. Rosenfeld doesn’t simplify the issue or frame the implant as a cure-all or a betrayal of identity. Instead, the focus is on Louise’s internal struggle to reconcile the distinct parts of herself.
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