Jellyfish Have No Ears, Adéle Rosenfeld
Translated from French by Jefferey Zuckerman
Louise is suspended between two communities, deaf and hearing, never solidifying her place in either. Language is a treacherous landscape that Louise navigates, and conversations, constructed by lip reading, are rife with voids in understanding. The doctors assure her that a cochlear implant is the only way forward.
Informed by Adle Rosenfeld’s own experience of partial deafness, and delicately translated by Jeffery Zuckerman, who himself has the implant, Jellyfish Have No Ears explores the depth and complexity of deafness as an invisible disability.
The book covers the conflicted time before deciding to have a cochlear implant, a life changing surgery that would offer Louise a completely reconstructed, artificial experience of sound, and eradicate all remaining natural hearing. Told that she has lost 15 decibels, Louise is tortured by impending silence, and riddled with imaginary characters possessing more presence in her life than real people. A vibrant if not controversial best friend and prickly disability politics in the workplace mean staying apace is exhausting.
Rosenfeld uses romantic, elegant metaphors to lyricise her relationship to sound and the world around her, reflecting her heightened visual abilities. These metaphors glisten amidst muddled sentences of uncertainty, words where they shouldn’t be, and the array of ways people utter and mutter without meaning, mere filler sounds to the hearing but destructive to lip readers.
Jellyfish Have No Ears explores many shades of loss, both the gradual kind in regard to dwindling sound, but also the sudden loss of self-Louise fears will occur with this surgery.
It is never revealed how Louise fares with the implant, but ultimately, that isn’t the point of reading this account. Instead, we witness language captured and excavated, and its crucial role in memory, connection, and founding our unique experiences of the world around us.
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