<< 1 >>
Rating: 
Summary: Praise for Mosquito
Review: "Her most ambitious novel to date. . . . Gayl Jones has written a novel that bears legitimate mention both in the gravity of its themes and virtuosity of its execution, with a classic of African-American literature written some 50 years ago, Ralph Ellison's 'Invisible Man'. That is high praise indeed, but not, in this instance unmerited." --Newark Star-Ledger (January 1999)"Mosquito, opinionated, talkative perhaps to fault, always recalls herself to the story of sanctuary in contemporary America and makes that thread well worth finding again." --San Diego Union-Tribune (January 1999) "By turns exhausting and exhilarating, 'Mosquito' is a stunning glimpse into one woman's search for her place in the cosmos. Highly recommended." --Library Journal (January 1999) "Jones's ability to create bizarre yet believable characters is magical, requiring a subtle act of faith between writer and reader. . . . The command of language is spectactular, as is the breadth of knowledge and allusions." --Jill Nelson, The Nation
Rating:
Summary: Praise for Mosquito
Review: "Reminiscent of Ishmael Reed's seriocomic 'Mumbo Jumbo,' 'Mosquito' is the novel as parody and pastiche. A composite layering of multiform texts, dense with allusions to myth and folklore, popular culture and literature, it offers an especially witty take on the fate of narrative (and of reading narrative), and on the making and marketing of literature in the Electronic Age. . . . Mosquito obviously parrots the familiar rhetoric of postmodernist narrative, echoed in numerous authorial statements by the likes of Toni Morrison and even Gayl Jones herself. While Mosquito as narrator knows far more about African American literary history than can be easily believed, she is hilarious on the subject. Everything from the fugitive slave narratives to Alice Walker's 'womanism' to Paule Marshall's 'praise-songs' gets its share of ribbing." --Deborah McDowell, The Women's Review of Books "Most apparent, though, and most surprising, is Jones's sense of humor. When she's at her best, her sly, subversive wit echoes Ishmael Reed at his most sarcastic. . . . Jones also manages to work in a brilliant discourse on the nature of the blues, an alternative take on the legend of John Henry and a luminous riff on. . . 'neo-Africanist satirists.'" --Jabari Asim, The Washington Post Book World "Fans of Jones or those who want to know what the stir is all about will want to follow Mosquito into a country where a self-taught workingwoman, struggling to understand who she is and to tell her story in her own words, can be heard on her own terms." --Sharon Broussard, The Cleveland Plain Dealer "What has been needed are writers and books that, through their audacios uniqueness, upset the status quo and challenge critics to take notice. Gayl Jones' new novel, 'Mosquito,' is such a book. . . . An accomplished novelist who has taken the risk to write a difficult book and dared her readers to join her. . . . An intellectual literary tradition is not built by being safe and conservative; it is built when more writers do as Jones has done in 'Mosquito': knocking down the walls, inventing new traditions and inviting the world to the dialogue. Get in the truck with Mosquito and go along for the ride." --David Haynes, Minneapolis Star Tribune "Gayl Jones continues to play with the formal constraints of fiction and with racial and gender issues that seem as fluid as the fictional forms themselves. . . . The most distinctive feature of the novel, however, is the black American speech rhythm that Mosquito uses to tell her story. Associative rather than logical, it insistently violates conventional syntax. . . . In a true jazz story, Mosquito explains, the audience can come in at any time with its own improvisation. That may be how Jones wants the reader to engage her own book as well." --Stanley Trachtenberg, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Rating: 
Summary: a remarkable adventure for those who love a winding tale
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: I tried and I tried......
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: I tried and I tried......
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: A Joycean romp through black Southwest in a truck
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Everyone should read this book
Review: 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!
Rating:
Summary: Everyone should read this book
Review: 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!
Rating: 
Summary: Stream-of-consciousness and natural history of the Southwest
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: Annoying dialect
Review: It was hard to get into this book because her main character speaks in this really annoying and improbable dialect.
<< 1 >>
| 
