Jellyfish have no ears A novel

Rosenfeld debuts with an immersive and surreal tale of a 20-something woman grappling with hearing loss. Narrator Louise feels "orphaned": "Not deaf enough to be a part of Deaf culture, not hearing enough to be fully within the hearing world." When her hearing loss becomes severe, her doctor suggests a cochlear implant, and Louise weighs the cost of losing the sensations she hears inside her body and sees in her mind's eye, sounds that magically "crashed against the dead eardrum" from across time. They include the sobbing of a soldier in WWI Brittany, and the barking of a dog named Cirrus who appears to her like a "cloud with long wisps." As she continues to deliberate, she keeps a "herbarium of sounds," cataloging each with a corresponding image (she records a fire truck's siren as an "overtone song of Red Sea snails"). Rosenfeld artfully depicts Louise's singular reality, revealing how "being 'Louise' is every bit as much who you were before losing your hearing as who you are now." Readers will admire Rosenfeld's sensuous writing. (Aug.)This review has been updated for clarity.

A beguiling, whisper-thin novel about a woman losing her hearing. At its best, fiction remakes the world, turning what we think we know totally upside down. That's the case in Rosenfeld's imaginative debut novel. Louise is totally deaf in one ear, with limited hearing in the other. When her hearing suddenly gets even worse, she needs to decide whether she's going to get a cochlear implant. At times absurd, but mostly poignant and inventive, the book is really about making sense of the world, exploring the gaps between perception and cognition. To Louise, who has lost her ability to hear middle-low frequencies, language becomes pure sound ("the warmth of timbres") and touch ("this soft sheen of wind") and even many senses mixed together ("all sound's snags and snarls"). Her hearing makes her vulnerable, as she studies people's lips, tries to snatch words from the world's din, guesses, and often mishears. In a restaurant, she thinks, "There was a chalkboard on which I was the hangman. 'F_ _ _ S H _ D?' the waiter was asking me." When her hearing keeps worsening, "the monster crouching deep in my ear…gorging on more and more words," she and her boyfriend communicate in the bathtub, her boyfriend at one end speaking into the water, and she at the other, her good ear resting on the surface of the water, absorbing the vibrations. The book is also a perceptive meditation on identity, with Louise stuck in a kind of "no-man's-land," as her doctor puts it, having "built a life as a hearing person" but with the "all the same problems as any deaf person." The question of who she is becomes more acute as she worries about how an implant might change her: "Would I recognize my mother's voice…my own voice?" In quietly dazzling prose, Rosenfeld captures what we know but haven't really seen, what we've heard but haven't quite registered. An utterly original take on self-perception and perception. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.