Is it worth losing the reality you have always known

Louise, a French woman in her twenties, has had difficulty hearing all her life. When the novel opens she is being examined in a clinic because her hearing has become worse and, depending on a speaker's register, she cannot hear at all. The specialist recommends a cochlear implant. Hearing "normally" would, of course, entirely change Louise's relationship to the world and her perceptions of reality. Is it worth it?

That's the central conflict of Jellyfish Have No Ears by Adéle Rosenfeld, translated from French by Jeffrey  Zuckerman. She is writing from the inside. As she writes in a note, "I was far younger than Louise F. when I got a cochlear implant in 1995 . . . As I faced down the list of heard and misheard words that, in English, begins 'woman, lemon, boulder' [a list that appears on the second page of the novel], it was deeply moving to enlist Beverly Fears, the audiologist who originally programmed my implant, and who had me do the same test countless times since, in recreating all the phonemes and meanings of the list in English.

Which indicates the task the translator faced. The novel is not a straightforward account of Louise's situation. Louise is telling her own story and recounting the words misheard for which Zuckerman had to find English equivalents because I suspect Louise's French puns and malapropisms cannot be translated directly.

The novel is exceptional because we are with Louise throughout, seeing and hearing her life, her Paris, her friendships, her jobs—all affected by, influenced by what she hears. As the prospect of surgery looms, she is accompanied by a damaged soldier from World War 1, an irritable dog, and a whimsical botanist.

As the jacket says, Jellyfish Have No Ears shines a light on the black hole of losing a sense and the vibrancy that can arise to fill the void.