Crucially, Paul West’s near-recovery from global aphasia makes significant contributions as a neurological case study. One of the things they discover during his therapy sessions is that traditional exercises do not accommodate the particular curvature at which his mind, the creative mind, had always engaged with the world. Neither are most of the therapists he encounters equipped with the vocabulary he had at his disposal prior to the stroke, into which his mind continues to fish: words like “tesseract,” “tardigrade,” and “cherubim” are assumed — until Ackerman steps in — to be “nonsense words,” the ramblings of the brain-damaged.

Ackerman has spent vast amounts of her life in the acts of sheer marveling and deep enquiry…. what emerges is a memoir replete with facts, trivia, intimate yarns and – in a manner which few post-trauma memoirists engage in – delight.

Ackerman, who herself is a quintessential example of how the artistic mind never traffics merely in dictionary definitions or other limitations of usage, offers through her experience as West’s caregiver two notable observations relating to aphasia. The first is that while West gropes for a basic word like “table,” it easily conjures the obscure, like “templum” – suggesting that it is possible that sophisticated language, learnt after childhood, is stored and processed in a different part of the brain. The second is that men are more prone to speech-related ailments, and this may have some correlation with evidence that women use both of the brain’s hemispheres to converse, and do so with more alacrity, whereas men primarily use the left side.

Ackerman has spent vast amounts of her life in the acts of sheer marveling and deep enquiry. Her literary career – in particular excellent nonfiction treatises such as A Natural History of Love and A Natural History of the Senses – are testament to this. In One Hundred Names for Love, she turns this same spirit toward her husband’s illness and recovery. What emerges is a memoir replete with facts, trivia, intimate yarns and – in a manner which few post-trauma memoirists engage in – delight.

There is an abundance of good humor in these pages that belies what a less effulgent heart might regard purely as a medical tragedy. We are treated to West’s bons mots and bolts from the blue with the astonishment of a parent whose child has said or done a clever thing, yet free of the condescension that a caregiver’s role could have easily introduced into the dynamic. Ackerman allows only small glimpses of the fatigue, frustration and pain that she must no doubt have experienced; a case of aphasia in a “house made of words,” as she calls it, is no less than a partial widowing.

Toward the end of the book, when the author shows her husband’s brain scans to a specialist who gravely guesses that they must belong to a person in a vegetative state, to know that they in fact belong to an aphasic who authored three books within five years of an irreversible stroke seems less a miracle than proof of the triumph of human will – including, not least, the will to laugh.

“You are the hapax legomenon of my life,” he says to her one day, unexpectedly dislodging from deep in the recesses of his knowledge the Latin term for “a word that occurs only once in the entire written record of a language.” By the end of this sparkling ode to love and intelligence, Ackerman and West emerge as no less admirable a duo – or “duet,” to use her word – than they were prior to the aphasia. Before aphasia, they were one of modern literature’s most formidable partnerships; after it, theirs is also undeniably one of the great love stories of our time.