Eliza Callahan’s debut novel, The Hearing Test, opens with a preface in which the narrator’s friend encourages her to watch the 1967 Soviet film July Rain. When she looks it up online, she finds the following description:

The heroes of this film are almost thirty and that very often at this time people have a period of revision of the positions already developed earlier. That is sometimes associated with loss. . . .  That she loses her former closest person who becomes a stranger and distant.

If this summary scans a little oddly it is because it’s a translation, she tells us. The narrator of The Hearing Test, unnamed until the final page, is also approaching thirty, an event marked for her by the marriage of a close friend in Venice at the novel’s outset. On the morning she’s set to leave for Italy she experiences a sound in her right ear like a “large sheet of metal being rocked,” visits a doctor, and is diagnosed almost immediately with sudden deafness — a condition that is exactly what one might imagine it to be. She is unlikely to make a full recovery from it, or any kind of recovery at all. The “former closest person” the narrator has been prophesied to lose is beginning to look like herself. She never makes it to the wedding in Venice.