Howard Jacobson - The Act of Love
Listen online: The novelist Howard Jacobson captured in conversation at the 2008 Ilkley Literature Festival.
His tenth novel, The Act of Love, is a dark and masterly tale of a man sexually aroused by the thought of his new wife in another man's arms.
Felix Quinn calls himself a happy man. He runs one of the oldest antiquarian bookshops in London and his wife, Marisa, is unfaithful to him. 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 an event occurs while he is honeymooning with Marisa in Florida that changes all that. At a stroke he goes from dreading the thought of someone else's hands on the woman he loves to thinking about nothing else.
In this podcast, Howard talks to the Yorkshire Post's Digital Editor David Behrens about the book, his distaste for book clubs, and why he couldn't wait to get out of Wolverhampton.
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Born in Manchester, England in 1942, Howard Jacobson was educated at Cambridge University. He lectured at the University of Sydney for three years before returning to England where he taught English at Selwyn College.
During the 1970s he taught English at Wolverhampton Polytechnic, an experience which provided the material for his first novel, Coming From Behind (1983).
Subsequent novels include Peeping Tom (1984), a comedy of sexual jealousy satirising literary biography; The Very Model of a Man (1992), a re-working of the Cain and Abel myth; No More Mister Nice Guy (1998), the story of television critic Frank Ritz's mid-life crisis; and The Mighty Walzer (1999), set in the Jewish community in Manchester during the 1950s, which won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic writing and the Jewish Quarterly Literary Prize for Fiction in 2000.
The Act of Love, 17.99, is published by Jonathan Cape, ISBN: 978-0224086097.
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