Customer Reviews

MOSQUITO

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Forgetting your environment, shutting out all of the "noise" in your head and floating along with Nadine in her rig is the only way to follow this iconoclastic, stereotype buster in a digressionary stream of consciousness that is erudite and banal at the same time. Some unevenness in jargon is annoying, but the wit and scope of the author is impressive and very entertaining. Not as poignant as THE HEALING and it takes more persistence (because of it's length) to keep on task with Nadine, but richer and at times very funny.

being from south texas, i did not find the dialect as improbable as other reviewers--in fact, i was impressed with jones's ability to absorb the abundant vernacular of the region. i found this book to be compelling and challenging without losing any of its appeal from its many digressions. i would recommend this book to anyone who is interested in race relations, the ethics of immigration, or anyone looking for a good story set in an unlikely region.

but after a week of trying to get through the first 20 pages, I realized that this book just wasn't for me. I'm a pretty fast reader, but with this book, I found myself re-reading the same pages over and over again. I guess it's all just a matter of opinion. You'll either love it, or downright hate. There's no in between.

I have never read Gayl Jones before, but I throughly enjoyed this book. It follows a stream-of consciousness pattern in the style of James Joyce, along with the jargon of a woman with no formal education so one must on occassion reread a passage to follow what has happened.

Jones reveals a rich knowledge of the culture, plants, and animals of the Southwest in this work. At times, I felt like I was reading a Tex-Mex Spanish primer.

This book is lenghty and unless you are a graduate of Evelyn Wood's speed reading course, you will need a few days to absorb its contents. However, the plot is interesting and the characters, particularly Mosquito, are well developed.

I don't understand the reviews which describe Mosquito's style as digressive because I found it incredibly focused. On one level it's a mosaic of ideas that could roughly be called "multiculturalist" or even "politically correct," though this is not at all to pigeonhole the book. As a white male reader I found it disorienting the way Mosquito specifies and then marginalizes the dominant culture: here the white man never speaks in his own voice and when he does appear it is as a stereotype--racist cop or immigration official. Almost as if Jones is trying to perform the kind of "othering" operation that the dominant culture has been practicing on women and people of color...on another level of course Jones deploys all the metanarrative props some of us crave but here they're put in service to her central themes of identity, mistaken identity, borders and border crossings...I could go on, just read this book!

It was hard to get into this book because her main character speaks in this really annoying and improbable dialect.