Mosquitoes [Mass Market Paperback]

William Faulkner (Author)

Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback
• Publisher: Dell Publishing Co., Inc. (1961)
• ASIN: B000KS9COC
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)

More About the Author

Born in 1897 in New Albany, Mississippi, William Faulkner was the son of a family proud of their prominent role in the history of the south. He grew up in Oxford, Mississippi, and left high school at fifteen to work in his grandfather's bank.

Rejected by the US military in 1915, he joined the Canadian flyers with the RAF, but was still in training when the war ended. Returning home, he studied at the University of Mississippi and visited Europe briefly in 1925.

His first poem was published in The New Republic in 1919. His first book of verse and early novels followed, but his major work began with the publication of The Sound and the Fury in 1929. As I Lay Dying (1930), Sanctuary (1931), Light in August (1932), Absalom, Absalom! (1936) and The Wild Palms (1939) are the key works of his great creative period leading up to Intruder in the Dust (1948). During the 1930s, he worked in Hollywood on film scripts, notably The Blue Lamp, co-written with Raymond Chandler.

William Faulkner was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949 and the Pulitzer Prize for The Reivers just before his death in July 1962.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Drunken artists on problematic pleasure cruise, June 28, 2006

By 

L.O.A. Reader (Newtown PA, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Mosquitoes: A Novel (Paperback)

While I didn't like this novel quite as much as Soldier's Pay, Faulkner's first novel, it was consistently entertaining with many superbly crafted moments. A middle-aged, dowdy matron of the arts invites a group of intellectuals/artists (e.g., a writer, a poet, a sculptor) and assorted other hangers-on for a disastrous (at least for the matron) cruise on an inland waterway in the Deep South. Also on the cruise are the matron's highly independent, idiosyncratic niece and nephew, other friends of the matron, various crew members, and a young couple who were just passing by when the boat was leaving port. The intellectuals spend most of their time drinking heavily and engaging in hard-to-follow intellectual banter, while lusting over the two alluring, attractive, very different young women on board. When the boat breaks down because the nephew steals an important part of the engine in order to complete an invention on which he's working, the beautiful, boy-like, ultra-quirky niece and a handsome steward leave the boat without telling anyone and get lost in the swampy, mosquito-infested, steaming lowlands, trying to make their way to a town that is much farther away than they think. This was the most serious and by far the most compelling subplot in the novel to me, and it runs quite a few pages. Extremely atmospheric and very humorous, the book provided me with an enchanting reading experience, albeit most of the characters were not very admirable people and one may wonder exactly what the point of the exercise was after completing it.

11 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Not Yoknapatawpha, not for me, August 1, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Mosquitoes: A Novel (Paperback)

This was not a bad not a bad book. I had to say that initially. For some other authors, this book could have been their masterpiece. The problem though, is that this is a Faulkner book. Faulkner reinvented the use of the English language in all the Yoknapatawpha books. The problem is that when you compare something as compicated as a Yoknapatawpha novel to anything else, it has to fall short. The plots of other Faulkner books are so dense and full of sybolism. Mosquitoes is not dense. It has a very mundane story about people on a boat. This, like other Faulkner novels revolves around the nature of human beings and their interactions. This novel is a more dialectical one in comparison to some of he other novels of his. We do not have the dark humor here that there is in a novel such as AsI Lay.... The epilogue redeems the novel with some of the dense writingthat Faulkner is notorious for. Read this after you read several other Faulkner novels.

8 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Is what it is., November 6, 2001

By 

S. K. Figler (Cambria, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Mosquitoes: A Novel (Paperback)

Mosquitoes is not what one would expect of Faulkner, which should not diminish one's enjoyment of the story. It is humorous and satirical. Absent Faulkner's typical familial, historical, and cultural baggage, his characters in Mosquitoes still agonize, which makes them interesting. Let Faulkner surprise you. Enjoy the characters he gives us here and their comedic byplay. Absorb what he has to say about art and writing, in particular. You won't get it anywhere else. Try not to compare Mosquitoes to his other work; it is what it is, a slow boat loaded with pleasure.