Crocodile Soup - Softcover

Darling, Julia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 186230050X ISBN 13: 9781862300507

Publisher: Anchor Books, 1998

Synopsis

Narrated by the central heroine, Gert, a curator in a northern museum, this story is interwoven with flashbacks to her eccentric and often surreal childhood. She had a hopelessly vain mother, a father constantly away at his African crocodile farm and a twin brother who becomes a Buddhist monk.

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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

About this edition

• Publisher: Anchor Books
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 186230050X
• ISBN 13: 9781862300507
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352