The Act of Love

Praise for
The Act of Love

“[A] fascinating sneak into love’s darkest alleys … Jacobson’s beautiful, rhythmic writing promises a kind of dank eroticism … Enormously funny … A gem of technical sophistication … To Jacobson, love is … complicated, funny, cruel, sick and always worth one’s while. Much like this wickedly terrific book.”

—
The Globe and Mail

“Twisted and acrobatically impressive …
The
Act of
Love
is both gorgeously and monstrously internal. To read it is to take a trip with someone so lucidly demented that you lose your bearings.”

—
The New York Times

“It is an almost frighteningly brilliant achievement. Why did the Booker judges not recognise it?”

—
The Guardian

“The dialogue … crackles like a wood fire. Jacobson’s unique prose style combines the Augustan balance of 18th-century Enlightenment writing with Nabokovian conceit and elegant modern aphorisms …
The Act of
Love
is a startling achievement: shocking, argumentative, funny, rude, querulous, intellectually bracing.”

—
The Independent

“One of the author’s most affecting, honest and brilliant works. It is a searingly well written piece by a ridiculously underrated novelist.”

—
The Sunday Telegraph

“A hell of a book … Intense and powerful, surprisingly funny, totally affecting, and disturbing. It stays with you afterwards, it makes you think differently about men in general and your partner in particular; it makes you reassess the undercurrents of your relationship. It makes you wonder.”

—
Observer Woman

“Exquisitely written, with sentences that coil slowly to reveal their full nature … There is much wisdom to be found in
The Act of Love
and Jacobson is a keen, ruthless observer of human behaviour.”

—
Edmonton Journal

“
The Act of Love
pushes out boundaries and escorts us—complicit voyeurs, like all consumers of art—into places we would rather not go … With eyes wide open he holds a mirror to the darkest aspects of the soul and suggests that instead of turning away we question our subservience to ancient, savage gods.”

—
The Times

“Exquisitely shocking and beautifully rendered.”

—
St. Petersburg Times
(Tampa Bay, Florida)

“Entertaining as well as erudite, [
The Act of Love
] prompts reflections upon art, obsession, masculinity, betrayal and the nature of the erotic … There surely cannot be a more vigorously intelligent novelist than Howard Jacobson writing in this country today.”

—
The Sunday Telegraph

“A robust novel—preposterous, disturbing and dazzlingly written.”

—
Kirkus Reviews

“Antiquarian bookseller Felix Quinn is sophisticated, intelligent, and a proper English gentleman in all ways but one: he longs to see his wife, Marisa, in the arms of another man … Jacobson conjures a twisted yet sophisticated love story here, walking a thin line between humor and erotica and often blending the two.”

—
Booklist

“An impressively sustained, and unusually intense, literary experiment.”

—
Literary Review

“Jacobson is the closest we in Britain have to Philip Roth … 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.”

—
Daily Mail
(UK)

“A master of the comedy of social awkwardness … Jacobson is playing a sophisticated literary game, in this most literate of novels.”

—Esquire

“Mesmerising … Delightfully funny … [Jacobson] 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 Scotsman

“A rumbustious account of sexual obsession … Jacobson [is] a witty and ribald chronicler of the human heart.”

—
Tatler

“It’s great to see a writer hitting his stride like this … Jacobson has done a terrific job. I was trying to work out what had impressed me most—and there’s a lot of great stuff. But I think the best thing is Jacobson’s sheer mental energy—the concentration, the intensity of thought.”

—
The Evening Standard

“Contains a rich vein of humour … Intelligent and erudite, Felix [the protagonist] is a fascinating character.”

—
Financial Times

“Naughtily erudite … Jacobson explores the nature of the erotic with a wicked twist … [The protagonist’s] narration is disconcertingly mannered, he’s remarkably honest and blisteringly funny, while Jacobson’s prose is sharp as ever, loaded with spiky dialogue and wonderfully arch observations.”

—
Publishers Weekly

“In the very beginning of this rich and riveting novel, Felix Quinn defines his kind of love … He makes his case well. Bright and beautiful sparks fly off him.”

—
The Boston Globe

“Jacobson is carving out a niche as the chronicler par excellence of warped, obsessive behavior … Felix’s narrative of love and loss is not only twisted but also witty, and the novel is not only literary but also literate—it’s peppered with writerly allusions from Herodotus to James Joyce, artistic allusions from Fragonard to Lawrence, and musical allusions from Schubert to the tango.”

—
Library Journal

Praise for
Kalooki Nights

“How is one to convey news of the arrival of a work of genius? This powerful, troubling, moving, profound novel is nothing less … What really steals one’s breath away is its sharpness and depth of insight … and the remorseless tragedy it unfolds, even as it makes one laugh aloud, sometimes in shock … The most intelligent and important novel to appear in this country in years.”

—
The Times
(UK)

“Jacobson is quite simply a master of comic precision. He writes like a dream, with a complete mastery of technique … He can have you in stitches either with a long, beautifully timed paragraph or with a mere two words …”

—
Evening Standard

“The raging, contentious, hilarious, holy, deicidal, heartbreaking
Kalooki
Nights
is a novel that stands toe-to-toe with the greats.”

—
Sunday Telegraph

“This is a welcome return to the bittersweet Yiddish-inspired humour at which Jacobson excels, and which has rightly earned him comparisons with Philip Roth … a gloriously pugnacious novel which, not unlike the fiction of Kingsley Amis in his pomp, wants to take on all-comers.”

—
The Guardian

“The funniest book published this year.”

—
Observer

“Jacobson’s masterpiece. The writing is flawless, with the author’s trademark blending of tragedy and comedy. A ferocious intelligence courses through it, reminiscent of Philip Roth at his ‘Counterlife’ best.”

—
Jewish Chronicle

PENGUIN CANADA

THE ACT OF LOVE

HOWARD JACOBSON
is the author of ten novels, including
Kalooki
Nights
(longlisted for the Man Booker Prize),
The Making of Henry, The Mighty Walzer
(winner of the 1999 EverymanWodehouse Award for comic writing),
Who’s Sorry Now?
and several works of non-fiction. He lives in London.

ALSO BY HOWARD JACOBSON

Fiction

Coming from Behind
Peeping Tom
Redback
The Very Model of a Man
No More Mister Nice Guy
The Mighty Walzer
Who’s Sorry Now?
The Making of Henry
Kalooki Nights

Non-fiction

Shakespeare’s Magnanimity (with Wilbur Sanders)
In the Land of Oz
Roots Schmoots
Seriously Funny: An Argument for Comedy

PENGUIN CANADA

Published by the Penguin Group

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(a division of Pearson Canada Inc.)

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First published in Canada by Penguin Group (Canada), a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 2009
First published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape, Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,
London SW1V 2SA, 2008

Published in this edition, 2009

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (WEB)

Copyright © Howard Jacobson, 2008

The author is grateful for permission to reprint copyright material from the following:
Eroticism
by Georges Bataille, translated by Mary Dalwood, reprinted by kind permission of Marion Boyars Publishers.
Flowers of Evil
by Charles Baudelaire, translated by Jacques LeClercq, reprinted by kind permission of Peter Pauper Press, Inc.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Manufactured in Canada.

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

Jacobson, Howard
The act of love / Howard Jacobson.

ISBN 978-0-14-317065-5

I. Title.

PR6060.A265A64 2010 823’.914 C2009-905646-1

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To Jenny – my one and only

The fever of the senses is not a desire to die. Nor is love the desire to lose but the desire to live in fear of possible loss, with the beloved holding the lover on the very threshold of a swoon. At that price alone can we feel the violence of rapture before the beloved.

Georges Bataille,
Eroticism

‘I’ll tell you . . . what real love is. It is blind devotion, unquestioning self-humiliation, utter submission, trust and belief against yourself and against the whole world, giving up your whole heart and soul to the smiter – as I did!’

Charles Dickens,
Great Expectations

Prologue

FOUR O CLOCK SUITED THEM ALL
–
THE WIFE, THE HUSBAND, THE LOVER
.

Four o’clock: when time in the city quivers on its axis – the day not yet spent, the wheels of evening just beginning to turn.

The handover hour, was how Marius liked to think of it.

Marius the cynic. Marius who held that natural selection gave the lie to God, and humanity the lie to natural selection. Marius who anticipated no more big adventures for himself, not even that last adventure left to modern man – ecstatic, immoderate, unseemly, all-consuming love. Marius who took pride in being beyond surprise or disappointment, there being nothing to expect of anybody, least of all himself. Marius the heartbroken.