The Heron Test – 11/08/2024

Jellyfish Have No Ears is a title it is hard to resist. My fingers had pressed the order button before I had processed what the novel may be about. When it arrived, I met a character in No Man’s Land, a woman whose lifelong deafness has grown suddenly worse but who is not deaf enough to be part of Deaf culture. “You’ve built a whole life as one of ‘them,’” a life-long profoundly deaf sign language teacher tells Louise, since she has verbal language and has taken extensive speech classes in order to sound ‘normal.’

With the deterioration of her hearing, Louise is asked whether she wants a cochlear implant. The complexities of what seemed (to me, in my ignorance) an obvious answer are explored in this brilliant and surreal novel. The implant may not work. Whether it does or does not, the way that Louise hears words, and sounds generally, will end. Not only that but her brain will forget how they used to sound. She begins a ‘sound herbarium’, capturing the noise of a siren, a storm, of frying onions, of dead leaves.

Adѐle Rosenfeld’s writing explores what it is to have language compared with hearing it, to hear one’s own voice and to lose that ability, to be always translating shapes into words, to experience jazz as one loses frequencies. Add to this that the reader may find themselves saying the written words aloud to test Louise’s mis-hearings or to reflect her experiences at auditory tests. Add further that the novel is translated from French by Jeffrey Zuckerman, who has a cochlear implant and, well… there are immeasurable layers and possibilities packed into exquisite prose.

It nudged me to read The Hearing Test by Eliza Barry Callahan, a novel in which a woman wakes up one morning with major hearing loss. She goes to the doctor and her sudden deafness is diagnosed as Sudden Deafness. Like Jellyfish, the novel explores her estrangement, often with humour while mourning the loss, and is obsessed with language and meaning.

Both novels cause one to think deeply about the limitations and vast possibilities of one’s senses and about the experience of self and what can destroy that. All whilst enjoying constant wordplay.

Reading these as I prepare for our short fiction group on Tuesday, at which we are discussing Attrib. by Eley Williams, is something of a stroke of luck. Her writing is obsessed with pushing the boundaries of language. Williams tests and toys with what we understand from one another even as we profess to hear the same words. And she too has excellent fun with the shape of a pun.

With impeccable timing for those interested in sensory and cognitive development and consciousness – and in jellyfish-related writing – Peter Godfrey-Smith’s Living on Earth is published next week. In Other Minds the scuba-diving philosopher-scientist investigates the mind of an octopus and the evolution of intelligent life. In Metazoa he looks at how the evolution of animals’ bodies affected the development of consciousness. In his latest book he examines how life has shaped and been shaped by our planet. Just the small stuff to consider of a Sunday afternoon.

Scaling that back a little, Vienna by Richard Cockett has recently come out in paperback and is an assault on one’s senses of the most joyful kind. Cockett explores how the city of Freud, Wittgenstein, Mahler, and Klimt has created the modern world from architecture to advertising, from surgery to sex, from nuclear fission to, well, fitted kitchens… Set out the torte forks and enjoy a taste of Vienna.

Younger readers hoping to grow into scuba-diving philosopher-scientists, or anyone curious about tiny bugs and plants, will love delving into The Observologist by Giselle Clarkson. It’s an illustrated guide for finding extraordinary things in what appear to be ordinary places, full of funny stories about exploration and ideas that might send even this bookseller outside in search of tiny spiders.  

Raising the stakes, No Climbing by Ross Collins may be the most dangerous picture book I’ve ever read. Don’t go climbing with a rabbit. You’ll have to read it to discover how this links seamlessly (succulently?) back to the tentacles with which I began.

Next week, all senses will be trained on poetry as we welcome Martyn Crucefix to Poetry in Herons. His translation of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetry has the crisp flavour of champagne, which is (sort of) what we will serve as a pre-drink before settling in to appreciate the greatest Austrian poet (bar Franz Sacher, inventor of that torte). Tickets are available online or in the shop.

May your Sunday encompass taut writing and chocolate torte,
Lizzie

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