Alone With You in the Ether by Olivie Blake
4/5 Stars. Read March 2024
This novel is a love story between two brilliantly neurotic minds, where art meets science and logic meets emotion.
This is one of the most unique novels I have ever read. Alone With You in the Ether is a love story exploring the connection between two highly individual and neurotic people. We gaze upon the inner workings of their brains, which break and bend and transform as they fall deeper in love with one another. Aldo, the male protagonist, views the world in a clean and mathematical layout. Reagan, the female protagonist, feels her emotions and compulsions with astonishing vibrancy. To me, this was not just a romance between two people, but between two ways of being, between art and science, between logic and emotion. What an intimate, difficult, beautiful book.
The novel starts slow but spirals into a whirlwind of emotion, mirroring the chaos of its characters.
The novel begins at a slow pace, but as Aldo and Reagan’s relationship progresses, it builds into a mania, a whirlwind of thoughts and emotions that sweeps you off your feet. There is chaos not just in the characters and plot, but in the very syntax of the writing. And though I loved the wild beauty of this book, it was also its shortfall. Occasionally, the fluctuating writing style and trains of thought gave me whiplash, to the extent that I sometimes found myself lost.
“She is in all of his spaces and all of his thoughts. He contemplates formulas and degrees of rationality and they all turn to her. He thinks about time, which has only recently begun, or at least now feels different. He thinks: the Babylonians were wrong; time is made of her.”