A Convergence of Animals in Human Suits

 i am writing a story about a man who fell in love with the english language 

A scandinavian linguist who has learned many languages and studied many, many more but out of all of them has classified english as the most structurally and phonetically lovely.

He will be a professor at some prestigious university, and all of his students will adore him, certainly, but he quickly develops Aphasia as a result of brain damage (not sure how yet) and thus can no longer speak the language at all, forgetting the majority of it, and retreats to the wilderness of indiana where he builds his own home apart from society, and he becomes obsessed with attempting to retain his fleeting knowledge of English, reading books and books daily (or at least the words he can remember), surrounding himself with its presence, constructing his house out of bricks upon which he has carved his favourite lines of poetry, refusing to eat anything but alphabet soup, and whenever he remembers a word for a mere instant he records it on his wall, the wallpaper being newspaper, words on top of words on top of words.

He passes away due to old age and his body is found and buried discreetly, a modest tombstone that simply says, “here lies a great, great man.”
And those six words will be a tragedy, for of course if it were up to him his tombstone would be covered with words, so many in fact that the letters themselves would be indistinguishable from one another, and his body would be wrapped in the pages torn out from his own books, so that his skin would be imprinted with the language he has loved for so many decades.

The story will be told in reverse, starting out with a commentary on his gravestone, then his time in the woods, then his years as a teacher, as a student, up to his birth in the hospital room with the obstetrician who hands her the child, and while smiling says that there is nothing wrong with her child, and that he will be a great, great man.

But the story will be designed and written in such a manner that it is possible to read it from end to beginning and beginning to end and still be coherent, and both versions will be included in the novel.