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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Drunken artists on problematic pleasure cruise, June 28, 2006
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.
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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 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.
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8 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Is what it is., November 6, 2001
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.
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