I Can't Get You Out of My Mind, by Marianne Apostolides

 

[Note: I know Marianne Apostolides.  First through her works, and email, and recently, in person.]

I Can't Get You Out of My Mind, by Marianne Apostolides takes the reader into some very deep (and sometimes swift) water.  This novel is an explanation and exploration of how we communicate and express love.  If you are familiar with her work, you will know that Apostolides throws everything into her writing, leaving nothing behind.  If she is going to explore love, then every avenue will be exhausted.  She will just as soon leave scorched earth behind in her quest.

In the process, the author examines love against and with AI, philosophy, art, and psychology, But the author is, as in many of her works, fascinated by the somatic experience.  How does love feel in the body?  What is loved as lived in flesh.

In the end, the reader will sense that they have been taken on a great voyage of discovery – although some of the ‘answers’ to the problem of love can never have adequate answers, and the author respects this.  Love is all around us, it binds us, it fills us with joy or hurts us, we live it, but it is a millennial-old mystery.  

Apostolides’ exploration of love both respects the past attempts to define love while forging ahead into the uncertain future.  She succeeds wildly.