Gabriel's Gift

By Hanif Kureishi

Book Overview

Gabriel's father, a washed-up rock musicisn, has been chucked out of the house. His mother works nights in a pub and sleeps days. Navigating his way through the shattered world of his parents' generation, Gabriel dreams of being an artist. He finds solace and guidance through a mysterious connection to his deceased twin brother, Archie, and his own knack for proudcing real objects simply by drawing them. A chance visit with mega-millionaire rock star Lester Jones, his father's former band mate, provides Gabriel with the means to heal the rift within his family. Kureishi portrays Gabriels' naive hope and artistic aspirations with the same insight and searing honesty that he brought to the Indian-Anglo experience in The Buddha of Suburbia and to infidelity in Intimacy. Gabriel's Gift is a humorous and tender meditation on failure, redemption, the nature of talent, the power of imagination--and a generation that never wanted to grow up, seen through the eyes of their children.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0743217136
• ISBN13: 9780743217132
• Release Date: October 2002
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.3" x 8.1"

Customer Reviews

Gabriel's Gift

The protagonist of Hanif Kureishi's delightful novel is Gabriel, a fifteen-year-old London schoolboy trying to come to terms with a new life, after the equilibrium of his family home has been shattered bt the ousting of his father. Fending for himself, as well as providing emotional support to his confused (and confusing) parents, Gabriel is forced to grow up quickly. The only support he can draw upon is from his remembered twin brother, Archie, and from his own 'gift', which is accompanied by sensations that urge him inti areas of life requiring the utmost courage and faith. A chance visit to seventies rock star Lester Jones crystallizes the turbulent emotions inside Gabriel, and helps him to recognize and engage with his gift. --- from book's back cover

Milestone in career

Since the mid-80s when Kureishi started to write I have been a close follower of his fiction work and screenplays. His main characters in his books whether in the Black Album, The Buddha of Suburbia and My Beautiful Laundrette are always at the crossroads. His characters live and mostly survive in a world accentuated by racial and sexual politics and loss and rediscovery of identity. Gabriel's Gift is a milestone in this career, more subtle in humour, more introspective yet lives up to an author's fame as a writer who knows how to use language.Gabriel's relationship with his Dad and his description of people who are lost in the meanders of the post-60s world is touching and powerful. Especially the first chapter of the book should be a standard text in literature and writing classes.

The Modern Fairy-tale

Society is still as dark and deceptive as ever but Gabriel, Kureishi's most recent teenage protagonist, has the gift to dispel its gloom. Gabriel's ill-suited parents have finally separated, he is bored, left to his own devices and well on his way to becoming a drug addict. But, instead of following all the easy paths to becoming a failure, he decides to take his parents' problems into his own hands. Although the story is unrealistically idealistic, it carries with it an unmistakable aura of hope, in the modern shape of fame. Fame is the gift and the fairy that can deliver anybody in style from all the difficulties of twentieth-first-century living. Once more Kureishi injects his characteristic comedy and light-heartedness into a serious subject without too much irreverence and with a little more hope. As a modern fairy-tale, 'Gabriel's Gift' is able to offer a nice dream with just enough kick in the backside to keep it real.