Author Julie Gilbert Discusses the Writing of Her New Book ‘Giant Love’
Julie Gilbert Today, we delve into the enduring relevance of the themes explored by Pulitzer Prize -winning author Edna Ferber
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Photo by Lance Anderson on Unsplash 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? Adèle Rosenfeld’s Jellyfish Have No Ears is about a woman going deaf gradually and then suddenly: an intimate novel in which the narrator’s mishearings conjures up all sorts of surreal circumstances. At a new job, an imaginary WWI soldier comments on the death certificates she has to scan; as she comes to terms with an increasingly unfamiliar city, she catalogs the sounds she’s losing as well as the “miraginary” plants through which she gets a new handle on reality—one in which she has to decide whether or not to get a cochlear implant and trade one form of hearing for another. When the novel came out in France, it was met with acclaim and compared positively to Boris Vian’s Mood Indigo and Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland . As a deaf translator with a cochlear implant, it was a true treat to bring Jellyfish Have No Ears into English , and on the occasion of its publication this August, Rosenfeld and I traded emails about the book’s wildness and wonder, and the singular feeling of finding, in these imaginary characters, our real selves. Jeffrey Zuckerman: Every time I talk about this book with my friends, they comment on how much they love the title: Jellyfish Have No Ears . In the two years I’ve been working on this book, I’ve found myself calling it two things: “the jellyfish book” and “the book about someone going deaf.” Did you have nicknames for the book, too? Adèle Rosenfeld: I personally call it “my jellyfish” (in the plural) or even just “jellyfish,” and, with this translation, that nickname is even better, because jellyfish can and do cross the Atlantic Ocean! While I was writing it, I had a working title, “Absourdité”—a pun on absurdité , absurdity, using sourdité , the French word for […]
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Julie Gilbert Today, we delve into the enduring relevance of the themes explored by Pulitzer Prize -winning author Edna Ferber
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