Unlock Editor’s Digest for free
FT editor Roula Khalaf selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Adèle Rosenfeld’s striking debut novel – a 2022 finalist for France’s prestigious Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman – explores what it’s like to live with an invisible disability. Louise F is partially deaf and lives in a state of sensory limbo: “Not deaf enough to be part of deaf culture, not hearing enough to live fully in the hearing world.” When tests reveal she has lost another 15 decibels, Louise is offered the option of a cochlear implant. But the operation is irreversible, meaning the loss of her natural hearing: “The warmth of timbres, that gentle shimmer of wind, of colors, of the hooks and growls of all sounds.”
As Louise weighs her options, she ruminates on her ongoing struggle to understand and be understood. Even an encounter with a waiter in a restaurant is filled with anguish: “There was a board with me as the executioner: ‘F_ _ _ SH_D?’ the waiter asked me.” She is employed by a local authority because she helps them meet their disability quota. After telling her colleagues that she had to lip-read, she remarks: “It was downright poetic that I needed light to hear. That was until they had to repeat what had already been said more than twice: all the poetry went to pieces and I went from poet to idiot.”
The film is largely based on Rosenfeld’s personal experience and was cleverly translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman (who himself received a cochlear implant in 1995). Louise’s hearing misunderstandings and the way she occasionally exploits her condition by turning off her hearing aid when people bore her or the traffic noise becomes too much are full of dry comedy. The title alludes to a jellyfish’s ability to survive without ears, and Louise uses similar means to communicate with her boyfriend in the bathtub: “The reverberation of the sound from his mouth travelled across the surface… only vibrations enveloped us. In those moments I was Thomas’s voice and he was mine, and I felt as if nothing was going to disappear.” In a music bar, she discovers that Thomas’s boyfriend is playing John Coltrane’s Blue Train to their hearing range.
Louise’s conflicting impulses are described lyrically: “I was used to the darkness of silence, but I could not forget the part of me that heard.” She fears that an implant would change her indelibly, or that she would no longer recognize her mother’s voice. “I imagined hearing myself as an unknown voice inhabited by someone else, and being torn inside, as if centuries had passed on the same street, without a sign, a trace.”
When a sense is impaired, neural restructuring often occurs in the brain. Louise’s imagination is heightened as she communicates with “ghosts of trauma” in her mind – a World War I soldier, a one-eyed dog and a botanist who, in a surreal twist, she conjures up while existing in a state of limbo.
By incorporating philosophical and medical considerations into the narrative, Rosenfeld sensitively illuminates Louise’s inner world. Jellyfish have no ears is a profound, sometimes playful meditation on deafness and the effects of sensory loss on interpersonal relationships.
Jellyfish have no ears by Adèle Rosenfeld, translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman MacLehose Press £10.99/Grey Wolf Press $17, 224 pages
Join our online book group on Facebook at FT Books Café and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen
