The Gift (Paperback, New Ed)

Status and the morality of gift giving are the two main themes that drive David Flusfeder's astonishingly attractive 'everyman' novel. Philip is a writer of technical instruction manuals, married to the wonderful Alice and the father of precocious twins. Their humdrum lives are enlivened only by their private attempts to perfect Taoist sex and their public attempts at fielding the intimacies of their friends. While Alice does a fine of job of managing Philip's relatively unsuccessful mates with tactical avoidance, Philip's sense of worth is threatened by Alice's far more successful crowd, and especially by the film-producing couple Barry and Sean. Barry and Sean adore Philip and his family. They shower them with expensive exotic gifts of mounting beauty and extravagance. Their generosity soon reaches oppressive proportions and drives Philip to the edge of civility when his own clumsy attempts at achieving a Balance of Payments fail miserably. Flusfeder's story is a delightful literary mongrel that straddles bloke lit and Eastern-lite mystique with ease. He juxtaposes middle-class normalcy and under-class insecurity to sharp comic effect. His characters are voiced with perfect authenticity, which contributes to an easy rhythm of irritable personal revelations periodically interrupted by a laugh-out-loud incident or observation of priceless incision. A classic. (Kirkus UK)

Problem: Best friends keep giving extremely generous gifts Solution: Give better ones in return Philip has a lot on his mind. At home, in his unnecessarily large, excessively expensive house in south London, he is attempting to become a Taoist master of love with his wife Alice, but his quest is forever being interrupted by the requests of his twin daughters: Can we have a pony - please? I want to go to boarding school - please? At work, in his shed/office at the bottom of the garden, between countless games of Minesweep and FreeCell, Philip is trying to pay the mortgage by writing instruction manuals for Korean bread-making machines. And, at parties where he is concerned that he is not taken seriously (he has been variously mistaken as a doctor/waiter and sinologist) Philip tells the world he is a scriptwriter, even though all he has managed to pen is a story he calls Wang the Unlucky Scholar. But, above all, Philip is worrying about his best friends Sean and Barry. The problem is simple: they give great presents. Their gifts are exquisite: a full set of Italian crockery, a handmade corkscrew from Venice. They give them indiscriminately: on birthdays, at parties and quite often for no reason whatsoever. And, most distressingly, these presents break all bounds of generosity: two FA Cup Final tickets beside the royal box, a skiing holiday for Philip's entire family. These are gifts that hurt a man's pride, these are gifts that can never be matched.

General

Imprint:	Fourth Estate
Country of origin:	United Kingdom
Release date:	February 2004
Authors:	David Flusfeder
Dimensions:	198 x 129 x 20mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Paperback - B-format
Pages:	320
Edition:	New Ed
ISBN-13:	978-0-00-714078-7
Categories:	Books > Fiction > General & literary fiction > Modern fiction
LSN:	0-00-714078-9
Barcode:	9780007140787

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