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Product Description
Review
...remarkably honest and blisteringly funny...Jacobson's prose is sharp as ever, loaded with spiky dialogue and wonderfully arch observations. -- Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
--This text refers to an alternate
Paperback
edition.
Book Description
All husbands, Felix maintains, secretly want their wives to be unfaithful to them. Felix hasn't always thought this way. From the moment of his first boyhood rejection, surviving the shattering effects of love and jealousy had been the study of his life. But while he is honeymooning with Marisa in Florida, an event occurs that changes everything. In a moment, he goes from dreading the thought of someone else's hands on the woman he loves to thinking about nothing else. Enter Marius into Marisa's affections. Now Felix must wonder if he really is a happy man.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
3.2 out of 5 stars (6 customer reviews)
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
2.0 out of 5 stars
Erotic, Exotic and Tedious, Jan 4 2010
By Cary B. Barad - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: The Act Of Love (Paperback)
An erotic, exotic and esoteric novel that deals with one man's fetish ad nauseaum. And it's not even a very prurient fetish. Lots of dialogue and litle action add up to a surfeit of tedium, although there is one brief account of a swingers'/fetishist club that piqued my curiosity.
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful
3.0 out of 5 stars
I Can't Believe I Read the Whole Thing!, Nov 5 2010
By Stephen Schwartz - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: The Act of Love (Hardcover)
Actually this novel reminded me of Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth, but it's not nearly as entertaining, clever, or absorbing as Roth's masterpiece. Like Portnoy's Complaint The Act of Love is the compulsive first person narrative of a sex obsessed man. It is all about sex of a mildly "perverted" sort. Felix Quinn, after observing his wife's breasts being examined by a doctor, becomes obsessed with being cuckolded (his word) by her. He arranges by various subterfuges for Marisa, his wife, to have an affair with Marius, a rather unsavory character Felix has met at a funeral. Felix cogitates endlessly about his masochism, the sexual thrill of knowing his wife is with another man, how only with intense jealousy can one feel the intensity of love, and so on and on and on in this vein. Alas, I don't share Felix's, shall we say, "oddity," so a lot of this was lost on me.But is Marisa really with another man? Felix's story or narrative has the feeling of fantasy. It seems to be a surreal twisting of Felix's imagination rather than the retelling of actual facts. The reader cannot tell what is the invention of Felix's overactive sexual cogitations or has genuine reality within the story world. The reader is absorbed by Felix's self-absorption, his quaint and orthogonal mental world. Well, I should say "not quite absorbed" in that I found it all a bit tiresome after awhile, and found myself reading faster and faster and savoring less and less. I guess I finished this novel despite my disinterest because I didn't have another book ready to hand. And one must have something to read mustn't one?
Unlike Portnoy, who is a nerd from Newark, New Jersey, Felix and Marisa are sophisticated and rich Londoners who live in Marylebone. I guess another reason I stuck with it is that I like novels about contemporary London. This one almost comes up to the bar in that sense.
Jacobson is a word master. Too bad his talent is wasted on Felix Quinn.
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful
3.0 out of 5 stars
masochism isn't pretty, Sep 27 2009
By Katherine "reader for the joy of reading" - Published on Amazon.com
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This review is from: The Act of Love (Hardcover)
there are moments in this book, sentences, and passages, that ring true. This, and the fact that the language of the book is well crafted, makes the book enjoyable. However, masochism is gratingly one-sided (i felt the same reading sacher-masoch decades ago). A better, less standard masochistic novel would have given voice to the other side, the other sides. another flaw is that there is no sex to speak of; the author holds back on sex but i think if it's gonna be about sex it's gotta have sex in the book.
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