  At first, I thought that the story The Rememberer was a smart one because it was a love story told in a very "defamiliarizing" way, so different from other love stories where lovers meet, like and love each other, and it ends either in sheer happiness and contentment or tragedy, or bitterness.
SCIENCE meets LOVE for the first time, literally, at least for me. The evolution-devolution theory in science was used to portray unconditional love. The man devolves into an ape, then a babboon, a turtle, and a salamander, but the woman still feels strong love for him. She said, "...I (Annie) wanted to meet the ape too, to take care of my lover like a son, a pet; I wanted to know him every possible way but I didn't realize he wasn't coming back.
" Like any person who's in love, Annie wanted to understand the different faces of the person she loves. Every inch of him. Every space of her man's flesh she kissed to prove it. The result is a renewed feeling of sentiments of lost, resignation, sadness and hopefulness. But is it? You see, we have a male character who, for me, is trying to be romantic. With his lines, "Annie, don't you see? We're all getting too smart. Our brains are just getting bigger and bigger, and the world dries upand dies when there's too much thought and not enough heart... Like us, Annie, we think far too much," he sounded so poetic, so philosophical, to the extent that the character was histrionic.
Even in Annie's recollection, "Another time he woke me up in the middle of the night, lifted me off the pale blue sheets, led me outside to the stars and whispered: Look, Annie, look - there is no space for anything but dreaming," the man was so overly romantic. The conversation about poetry after the sex was so theatrical. In short, the man's faking it, even if it breaks the stereotype that men are the more rational gender. So what does this say about Annie? She comes out more realistic, at least in her narration. She says, "I sat down. I remembered how the first time we had sex, I left the lights on, kept my eyes wide open, and concentrated really hard on letting go..." Instead of saying, "the first we made love", she casually says, "the first time we had sex" and that shows sincerity and honesty.
In this passage, "I (Annie) tried to dream up to the stars, but I didn't know how to do that. I tried to find a star no one in all of history had ever wished on before, and wondered what would happen if I did," the woman tried to be romantic, but she ended up thinking a reason why she would. She also admits it was her job to remember once her man is gone. It wasn't natural for her to remember. She was clear. It was her job. The juxtaposition of the main characters are good, but I just don't get it why did the woman still think that her man was still her man when he devolved.
She dripped tears into the pan where her lover was when she saw him staring at her. Even before she saw him when he turned into ape, she knew right away it was him because he gave her his same, sad look. She was hopeful in the end that she would find her man, washed up and lying naked on the shore. Isn't this so romantic, and yet she was presented as the opposite? Why would she want to remember a shape-shifter anyway? 
