Crocodile Soup - Softcover

Darling, Julia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0060090405 ISBN 13: 9780060090401

Publisher: Ecco Press, 2002

Synopsis

Gert Hardcastle is thirty-something and unlucky in love. She is also estranged from her mother. As Crocodile Soup opens, she thinks she has found "the One" -- the enigmatic Eva, who serves coffee at the cafeteria in the museum where Gert works as a curator cataloging Egyptian artifacts. As Gert embarks on her hilarious and poignant pursuit of Eva, she looks back on her eccentric, childhood through a series of vivid and surreal flashbacks: her obsessive twin, Frank, with whom she communicates telepathically; her father, George, who vanished to Africa to salvage the family crocodile farm; her vain, neglectful mother, Jean; and the family ghost -- a Victorian poet who haunts the attic.

In a narrative studded with relentless humor and giddy self-deprecation, Julia Darling introduces an endearing cast of characters whose shared and wayward search for love is irresistible.

About this title

Review:

Gert works in the Egyptian room at a museum. At 35 her life is in stasis. Her mother, whom she hasn't seen for years, writes her a letter asking for help and forgiveness. At work, she sees a young woman ballroom dancing alone in the empty cafeteria and it's love at first sight. How can she seduce this pale-faced beauty? She starts remembering her strange childhood, how her father left for a crocodile farm in Africa and her mother started drinking while Gert and her twin brother Frank floated about in their own psychic spheres. Her articulation of this lonely time releases her from alienation and the novel pushes forward to its moving resolution.

Darling's prose would make any poet jealous. The idiosyncrasies of Gert's world and imagination are drawn so precisely that we can almost smell the house in which she grew up, almost feel physically transported to the particular corners of her outsider perspective. It is a novel about mothers and lovers and the struggle to grow up, a novel of spirit and humour wrought out of the mini-tragedies of adolescence and family psycho-drama which provoke Gert's mid-thirties crisis and its exorcism. Julia Darling is a real writer. This is a debut that promises a great career. --Hannah Griffiths

From the Back Cover:

Gert Hardcastle is thirty-something and unlucky in love. As the novel opens, she thinks she has found The One - Eva, who works in the cafeteria of the northern museum where Gert catalogues the Egyptian artefacts. As Gert embarks on her hilarious and poignant pursuit, she looks back on her eccentric childhood.

About this edition

• Publisher: Ecco Press
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0060090405
• ISBN 13: 9780060090401
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352