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"  If it were fiction, the irony would be ham-fisted. In 2004, just when acclaimed author \u00ADDiane Ackerman (A Natural History of the \u00ADSenses) had finished a new book about the brain, her husband, novelist Paul West, suffered a massive stroke that left him mute. &amp;quot;Tailor-made to his private hell,&amp;quot; Ackerman says about it when we talk by phone. Not only were words his livelihood (&amp;quot;He had one of the largest working English vocabu\u00ADlaries on earth&amp;quot;), they were the \u00ADmedium of the couple&amp;#039;s long-running marriage, their witty wordplay marking off a marital private space as effectively as a bedroom door.  Ackerman&amp;#039;s memoir of this catastrophe and its after\u00ADmath, One Hundred Names for Love (Norton), is the story of her devotion to their marriage and to language itself (the two can hardly be separated). CT scans of West&amp;#039;s brain appear so dire that an ER doctor who examined one of them well after the stroke occurred surmised that West had probably managed to survive only in a vegetative state; in fact, he had already written several books since being stricken. Ackerman throws herself into the battle to help him reclaim his fluency, shifting \u00ADbetween the in-the-moment reality of a scared, exhausted spouse and that of the ever-curious naturalist dropped into the ecosystem of the unwell\u2014capable of mordantly describing an early hospital escape attempt as follows: &amp;quot;He managed to...put his loafers on the wrong feet, and abscond naked down the hallway, sliding along the wall as if he were installing wallpaper.&amp;quot;  The first weeks are harrowing for both Ackerman and West, but it is the rehabilitation that takes place in their upstate New York home that is the soul of this book. Their \u00ADmission is straightforward: to retrain West to remember and retrieve \u00ADbasic English from his &amp;quot;padlocked mind.&amp;quot; The novelist faces formidable odds: He is aphasic\u2014the explosion in his brain having wiped out areas that processed language. His struggles will sound familiar to anyone who has tried to learn a foreign language via total immersion: the pleasing facility in the morning, the tongue-thickening mental fatigue that grows throughout the day, the crankiness and collapse by evening\u2014&amp;quot;sundowning,&amp;quot; Ackerman calls it.  Resonant too is her view of how complacency can creep into the strongest relationships\u2014and how a crisis can upend it. &amp;quot;The nature of habit in the brain is that it makes you slur over the details that you were first so acutely aware of,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;Love needs changing and adventure as well.&amp;quot; Post-stroke, every day for Paul West is an adventure, and one that&amp;#039;s overwhelming without Ackerman&amp;#039;s constant support. Almost seven years on, he has recovered his powers sufficiently to resume his writing career but still has trouble speaking a straight sentence in the afternoon. (After one such derailment into gibberish, she writes that he wistfully intones, &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s just the soft catechism of a great machine falling apart.&amp;quot;)  So yes, this is a love story, but for all the fierce effort Ackerman invests in West&amp;#039;s rehab, what really brings him back is their shared love of playful, flamboyant language that first brought them together four decades ago at Penn State\u2014he the worldly literature professor, she the fearless undergrad. The stroke left his hypersophisticated adult vocabulary relatively unscathed, so everyday communication often involves finding a circuitous scenic route when the superhighway of simple English has been knocked out. (This linguistic strategy mirrors what&amp;#039;s going on inside the brain as healthy regions make new connections between each other and around the dead zones.) Ackerman writes that one morning, her husband woke up and asked where his &amp;quot;cantilever of light&amp;quot; was. &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;ve been married so long,&amp;quot; she says, &amp;quot;I knew that he meant, `Where&amp;#039;s my velour jogging suit?&amp;#039;\u2009&amp;quot; That same necessary ingenuity gave rise to her book&amp;#039;s title. After the stroke, West couldn&amp;#039;t remember any of his old pet names for his wife, so he made up a hundred new ones, one a day, as a speech therapy exercise. My favorite: &amp;quot;O Parakeet of the Lissome Star.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/books/reviews/a11597/book-release-one-hundred-names-for-love-559729/>