The Crocodiles
A Novel
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- $26.99
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- $26.99
Publisher Description
Set in Cairo between 1997 and 2011, The Crocodiles is narrated in numbered, prose poem-like paragraphs, set against the backdrop of a burning Tahrir Square, by a man looking back on the magical and explosive period of his life when he and two friends started a secret poetry club amid a time of drugs, messy love affairs, violent sex, clumsy but determined intellectual bravado, and retranslations of the Beat poets. Youssef Rakha’s provocative, brutally intelligent novel of growth and change begins with a suicide and ends with a doomed revolution, forcefully capturing thirty years in the life of a living, breathing, daring, burning, and culturally incestuous Cairo.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Rakha's dizzying novel, set in Cairo between 1997 and the first few days of 2012, disdains narrative arcs and linear chronology, perhaps because its focus is a group of young Egyptians who admire the freewheeling works of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and other Beats. The narrator, Youssef, and his friends form "The Crocodiles Movement for Secret Egyptian Poetry," and spend their youth writing poetry and experimenting with sex, drugs, and booze. Behind them lurks the political unrest of Cairo, and, once the Arab Spring reaches Egypt, one uprising quickly follows another. The novel is comprised of numbered, discrete paragraphs that lend the whole a disjointed feel. The narrative leaps between years and decades, often within the same paragraph; the result may be deliberately disorienting, but also places a distancing effect on events. But from its opening depiction of a suicide to its final pages, the author paints a disquieting picture of wild young people who can only look forward to a future that remains unresolved.
