The Act of Love

'The Act of Love is naked, haunting, unflinching. Its account of sexual obsession is frightening, painful and finally very moving. A tour de force' - Harold Pinter No man has ever loved a woman and not imagined her in the arms of someone else. Felix Quinn calls himself a happy man. He owns one of London's oldest antiquarian bookshops. He is married to and adores the beautiful Marisa. But a childhood experience has taught him that loss is intrinsic to love, and Felix realises that he can only be truly happy if his wife is sleeping with another man. Enter Marius into Marisa's affections. And now Felix must ask himself, is he really happy? By the winner of the 2010 Man Booker Prize.

About the Author :
Howard Jacobson has written eighteen novels and six works of non-fiction. He won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Award in 2000 for The Mighty Walzer and then again in 2013 for Zoo Time. In 2010 he won the Man Booker Prize for The Finkler Question; he was also shortlisted for the prize in 2014 for J.

Review :
It's Jacobson's genius that he uses Felix's perversion as a torture garden in which a hundred interlinked images, theories, arguments, stories and literary allusions flourish and blossom... A startling achievement: shocking, argumentative, funny, rude, querulous, intellectually bracing A gloriously literary, highly wrought narrative as darkly transgressive, as savage in its brilliance, as anything Jacobson has written... Jacobson is a connoisseur of the harm lovers inflict on each other: he rolls their recriminations on his tongue, savours the bile, relishes the sticky sweetness of passion, and tastes the salty tears that can never quench the perpetual thirst for love The narrative is masterly. Entertaining as well as erudite, it prompts reflections upon art, obsession, masculinity, betrayal and the nature of the erotic... serves above all to confirm his creator's mighty individual talent. There surely cannot be a more vigorously intelligent novelist than Howard Jacobson writing in this country today Howard Jacobson injects a kind of molten energy into English that makes it move like another language altogether... Obsession, hidden desires and the salacious thrill of voyeurism all play their part in this brawny tale of love's flagellant Intense, powerful, surprisingly funny, totally affecting and deeply touching An impressively sustained, and unusually intense, literary experiment He is a master of the comedy of social awkwardness... Jacobson is playing a sophisticated literary game, in this most literate of novels Mesmerising...also as delightfully funny a novel as one would expect from Jacobson, who revels in language and in the perverse spell it can cast... The Act of Love is spellbinding, not just in its characterisation, or in its simplicity of plot, in the flirtatiousness with which Jacobson courts language, or the stylish sardonic humour that seems to come so easily, but in its entirety The Act of Love, like Jacobson's other work, contains a rich vein of humour...Intelligent and erudite, Felix is a fascinating character Jacobson's page-turning account of sexual obsession is replete with erudite flourishes and sophisticated insight