Alone With You in the Ether

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Interactions that seem so small and minute between them felt so intimate and so tender that my heart ached in the best way. It was like I watched it unfold so slowly in front of me. A single paragraph left me so giddy and not a word was spoken between them. It was the way they gravitated to each other that felt so intoxicating and... am I just being dramatic?!?! Idk you'll have to find out and read it (I totally dont think so though 🤗)

Alone With You in the Ether by Olivie Blake (Paperback, 2020)

THE NARRATOR, AN AGING, ARTHRITIC MAN IN POSSESSION OF MANY BOOKS: We interrupt your perusal of Aldo Damiani’s intrusive thoughts to provide some necessary academic insight. The great Kurt Gödel, a twentieth-century logician and friend of Albert Einstein, believed that a continuous trajectory of “light cones” toward the future meant that one could always return to the same point in space-time. It is Aldo Damiani’s essential thesis that these cones travel methodically, perhaps even predictably, along hexagonal paths. If you’re looking for a book you will want to talk about for a long time (and have plenty of people to talk to about it), The Atlas Six is it.” — Buzzfeed I could study you for a lifetime, carrying all of your peculiarities and discretions in the webs of my spidery palms, and still feel empty-handed.”Narrated primarily by Robb Moreira and Sura Siu, this program features a cast of cameos, including one from the author. Lethally smart. Filled with a cast of brilliantly realized characters, each entangled with one another in torturously delicious ways, The Atlas Six will grip you by the throat and refuse to let go. Olivie Blake is a mind-blowing talent.” —Chloe Gong, author of NYT Bestselling These Violent Delights If you’re looking for a book you will want to talk about for a long time (and have plenty of people to talk to about it), The Atlas Six is it.”— Buzzfeed

Alone With You in the Ether Paperback – June 20, 2020

protagonists Aldo and Regan’s perspectives. The listener is immersed into their sharply distinct, mundane, yet complex worlds..."- Booklist There was something about 'Alone With You in the Ether' that drew me in, tangled me in its abyss, trapped in the world of these two complex characters. Blake delivers seemingly effortless storytelling that loops through exciting metafiction techniques, such as a whole host of narrators intruding in on the story in part 1, including an “overzealous Cubs fan,” or “an aging, arthritic man in possession of many books” as well as stage direction details. It ushers us into the narrative with a fun and frenetic cinematic energy. I would have enjoyed it if Blake continued this style more through the book as I missed it, but once the characters are established it instead turns more inward as they attempt to have more of a harness on their own narratives. The perspective rotates between Regan and Aldo, offering both internal and external perspectives on each other creating more dynamic characters but also allowing us to detect inconsistencies that show how a self-image is often a slight fiction. This is particularly true for Regan who ‘ was most comfortable when she was at her falsest. Regan did not enjoy honesty, she hated it, was repulsed by it and by her own truths especially,’ and the way the readers perceptions on Regan morph over the course of the book—and with new revelations on her life—emphasizes the way a person seems always in flux. But most notably, this sashaying of perspectives is like a needle threading the two together until, at the end, we witness them as a seamless whole viewed from the outside with a conversation entirely narrated of he said and she said instead of a duality of perspective. For Regan, life is a finish line of mutually assured disappointment. Her method of coping with the dreariness of existence is to project herself into imagined multipotency, spinning new threads of destiny with every impulsive decision she makes. For Aldo, life is a plague of constancy--a structure of rules and formulas that keep him going, without which the entire frame of his existence would collapse. The beginning might confuse you and might leave you scratching your head but godddd, this story was so beautiful. Push through and you're going to fall in love with them.Olivie has penned several indie SFF projects, including the webtoon Clara and the Devil with illustrator Little Chmura and the viral Atlas series. As Follmuth, her young adult rom-com My Mechanical Romance releases May 2022. someone said this book felt like seeing god and they’re completely right. it felt like i was in heaven and hell at the same time too.

Alone with You in the Ether: A Love Story|Paperback Alone with You in the Ether: A Love Story|Paperback

Their personalities had two or three distinct traits and little to nothing else to cling onto, as a reader, as we meander throughout their relationship that seems all consuming to them, but, as an outsider, deeply confused me because they speak for hours on hand but manage to say nothing in the process. Their connection is superficial and deeply obsessive (they both don’t have a single friend and barely reach out to their family because they are all consumed by each other), and it concerns me that their ending connection feels like a triumph when they are not in a good place to be in a relationship.

For Regan, people are predictable and tedious, including and perhaps especially herself. She copes with the dreariness of existence by living impulsively, imagining a new, alternate timeline being created in the wake of every rash decision. Two unusual people find intellectual and emotional stimulation with each other, shaking up their stagnant lives.

Alone With You in the Ether by Olivie Blake - Dymocks Alone With You in the Ether by Olivie Blake - Dymocks

This is our love, do you see it? This is what it looks like to love you; it looks like an abyss, but it isn’t, do you understand? All falls come with danger, Aldo, but not us. Not us, we float. There are books that are written in such a beautiful way that it feels like no words can do my thoughts justice on this. Their nonverbal interactions had me SCREAMING!! Butterflies in my stomach. Aldo’s mother, a lively Dominican girl too young for motherhood and too beautiful to stay long in one place, had never been very present. If she had ever asked anything from the universe, Aldo imagined she’d probably gotten what she wished.i will cherish this book with every fiber of my being for the rest of my life and i want it engraved upon my heart. call it insanity, i call it common sense because in what world would someone not be completely bewitched by this masterpiece ? When you learn a new word, you suddenly see it everywhere. The mind comforts itself by believing this to be coincidence but isn’t—it’s ignorance falling away. Your future self will always see what your present self is blind to. This is the problem with mortality, which is in fact a problem of time.’ So this is what it is to love something you cannot control, he thought. It felt precisely like terror.’ The prose is quite engaging and this is a much faster paced novel than I tend to read so I was gripped the whole way through. Blake aims for grand phrasing of emotions that land quite impactfully and, sure, it may be overwrought at times but that's exactly how obsessive love feels. I love the way it spirals through the stratosphere or seems to be tumbling out of control or even trails off mid-thought because it so lucidly captures untethered emotions (and intrusive thoughts, which are constantly present in this book). There is a musicality to it, but it is like every instrument in a band trying to all take a solo at once in the cacophony of feeling so much you aren’t sure if you can contain it. It is art, pure and simple.