The Act of Love, by Howard Jacobson
From ‘Readers’ Wives’ to Molly Bloom, the idea of a man somehow sharing his loved one sexually is a common and complex one. ‘No man has ever loved a woman and not imagined her in the arms of someone else’, asserts Felix Quinn, the pompous narrator of Howard Jacobson’s latest taboo-breaker. As he recounts the story of his seduction-by-proxy of his own wife, he runs through the canon of voyeuristic wife-pimping from Herodotus’s account of Candaules and Gyges through Fragonard’s ‘The Swing’ to Pierre Klosowski by way, repeatedly, of Othello. Quinn’s rather twisted, masochistic point is that jealous love fears loss; better to have a hand in the process. He calls it ‘self-protection’, and argues that it is an utterly loving act.
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