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Mosquito
Bury those easy-to-read Black romance books. Mosquito is where African-American literature is heading as we approach the twenty-first century.--E. Ethelbert Miller, Emerge
''Mosquito'' is a sprawling 616-page meditation on the capacity of black vernacular speech to narrate a novel, a word I use advisedly to describe a text that is far more an imitation of actual oral storytelling -- the way true stories is,'' as the narrator tells us, pausing for breath -- than it is a linear narrative with a beginning, a middle and an end. It is as if Jones wanted to deliver a dissertation about orality in literature by transcribing hours of tapes from a loquacious storyteller.
Sojourner Nadine Jane Johnson -- nicknamed Mosquito -- is an African-American woman from Kentucky who drives a truck on the border between Texas and Mexico. Along the way, she becomes an unwitting agent of the contemporary underground railroad, as she puts it -- the Sanctuary movement, dedicated to the safe passage of illegal immigrants from Mexico to the United States. The plot of the novel turns on Mosquito's rambling discourses with a cast of characters including her homegirl, Monkey Bread; a remarkably erudite bartender, Delgadina; Maria, a very pregnant immigrant whom Mosquito accidentally rescues and transports to safety; and Ray, her lover, who is a principal in the movement. But these characters and their actions are merely devices that enable Mosquito to riff seemingly endlessly in breathless sheets of sound that call to mind John Coltrane's late avant-garde period
- Henry Louis Gates JR
''Mosquito'' is a sprawling 616-page meditation on the capacity of black vernacular speech to narrate a novel, a word I use advisedly to describe a text that is far more an imitation of actual oral storytelling -- the way true stories is,'' as the narrator tells us, pausing for breath -- than it is a linear narrative with a beginning, a middle and an end. It is as if Jones wanted to deliver a dissertation about orality in literature by transcribing hours of tapes from a loquacious storyteller.
Sojourner Nadine Jane Johnson -- nicknamed Mosquito -- is an African-American woman from Kentucky who drives a truck on the border between Texas and Mexico. Along the way, she becomes an unwitting agent of the contemporary underground railroad, as she puts it -- the Sanctuary movement, dedicated to the safe passage of illegal immigrants from Mexico to the United States. The plot of the novel turns on Mosquito's rambling discourses with a cast of characters including her homegirl, Monkey Bread; a remarkably erudite bartender, Delgadina; Maria, a very pregnant immigrant whom Mosquito accidentally rescues and transports to safety; and Ray, her lover, who is a principal in the movement. But these characters and their actions are merely devices that enable Mosquito to riff seemingly endlessly in breathless sheets of sound that call to mind John Coltrane's late avant-garde period
- Henry Louis Gates JR
624 pages, Paperback
First published December 29, 1998
28 people are currently reading
3403 people want to read
About the author
Gayl Jones
41 books597 followersGayl Jones is an African-American writer from Lexington, Kentucky. Her most famous works are Corregidora, Eva's Man, and The Healing.
Jones is a 1971 graduate of Connecticut College, where she received her Bachelor of Arts degree in English. While attending the college she also earned the Frances Steloff Award for Fiction. She then began a graduate program in creative writing at Brown University, studying under poet Michael Harper and earning a Master of Arts in 1973 and a Doctor of Arts in 1975.
Harper introduced Jones's work to Toni Morrison, who was an editor at the time, and in 1975, Jones published her first novel Corregidora at the age of 26. That same year she was a visiting lecturer at the University of Michigan, which hired her the following year as an assistant professor. She left her faculty position in 1983 and moved to Europe, where she wrote and published Die Vogelfaengerin (The Birdwatcher) in Germany and a poetry collection, Xarque and Other Poems. Jones's 1998 novel The Healing was a finalist for the National Book Award, although the media attention surrounding her novel's release focused more on the controversy in her personal life than on the work itself. Her papers are currently housed at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University. Jones currently lives in Lexington, Kentucky, where she continues to write.
Jones has described herself as an improvisor, and her work bears out that statement: like a jazz or blues musician, Jones plays upon a specific set of themes, varying them and exploring their possible permutations. Though her fiction has been called “Gothic” in its exploration of madness, violence, and sexuality, musical metaphors might make for a more apt categorization.
(from Wikipedia)
Jones is a 1971 graduate of Connecticut College, where she received her Bachelor of Arts degree in English. While attending the college she also earned the Frances Steloff Award for Fiction. She then began a graduate program in creative writing at Brown University, studying under poet Michael Harper and earning a Master of Arts in 1973 and a Doctor of Arts in 1975.
Harper introduced Jones's work to Toni Morrison, who was an editor at the time, and in 1975, Jones published her first novel Corregidora at the age of 26. That same year she was a visiting lecturer at the University of Michigan, which hired her the following year as an assistant professor. She left her faculty position in 1983 and moved to Europe, where she wrote and published Die Vogelfaengerin (The Birdwatcher) in Germany and a poetry collection, Xarque and Other Poems. Jones's 1998 novel The Healing was a finalist for the National Book Award, although the media attention surrounding her novel's release focused more on the controversy in her personal life than on the work itself. Her papers are currently housed at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University. Jones currently lives in Lexington, Kentucky, where she continues to write.
Jones has described herself as an improvisor, and her work bears out that statement: like a jazz or blues musician, Jones plays upon a specific set of themes, varying them and exploring their possible permutations. Though her fiction has been called “Gothic” in its exploration of madness, violence, and sexuality, musical metaphors might make for a more apt categorization.
(from Wikipedia)
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May 24, 2018
It is hard to imagine a more timely read, dealing as it does with issues of gender and power, the Sanctuary movement and immigration in general, racism, and the possibility of storytelling to be act of resistance, of guerrilla warfare. It also challenges one’s assumptions about voice, language use, and intelligence (most obviously (apart from Mosquito herself), for example, in the way a Vietnamese woman, fluent in her native tongue and in French, is considered little more than an idiot by her co-workers in a diner due to her halting, broken English). Mosquito’s voice (or, to give her her full name, Sojourner Nadine Jane Nzingha “Mosquito” Johnson) is fast-paced, full of story after story, thought after thought, looping back to things mentioned hundreds of pages earlier, refusing to follow any traditional narrative arc, colloquial, slang-filled, liberated, freed, proudly working-class and self-created.
Here is the first paragraph:
”I was on one of them little border roads in South Texas, you know them little narrow roads that runs along the border between South Texas and northern Mexico. Maybe that Diary Mart Road, probably that Diary Mart Road, though all them border roads in them border towns looks alike. On either side of the border. Brownsville, Laredo, Del Rio. All them border towns. I usedta travel into Brownsville in Cameron County a lot because it one of them international seaport towns. That’s when I was transporting electronics, apparel, and transporting for the shrimping industry. This that Diary Mart Road, though. Your source for superior tanning products, one of them roadside signs say. It’s got them Southern California types in they bikinis showing off they tans. Another roadside sign advertising cactus candy and got a picture of a buffalo and some cactus. I’s got me a teacup I got from a trade show that have got a handle that is in the shape of a cactus and resembles that exact same cactus. I mean the handle of it ain’t a ordinary teacup handle, it’s a cactus, so when you holds the teacup you’s got to hold the cactus. I think that that cactus is the archetypal cactus, ’cause I has seen more cactus like that in them ads than I has in the Southwest itself. I calls it Arizona cactus, but I don’t know its true name. Another sign advertising Brownsville as a tourist attraction. It tells you that Brownsville ain’t just Brownsville, but it got all the amenities for tourism, that tourists don’t got to go to Acapulco or even Tijuana, that they can come to Brownsville. I try to think of the Kiowa word for Brownsville, or maybe it the Kiowa word for Sweetwater I’m trying to think of. Sound like the name of somebody, like the names that they gives people in the South, though, that Kiowa word.”
Whether or not the idea of 600 pages of this voice appeals to you is something for you to consider. I would note, however, that it is easy to skim over the very complex and subtle stuff going on even in this short paragraph. It is too easy to make assumptions about shallowness when one is not reading what we are taught is an "intelligent" voice.
Conversations and digressions, letters, extracts from plays, leaflets from the Daughters of Nzingha, the adventures of Mosquito’s childhood friend “Monkey Bread”, who works as a personal assistant to a Hollywood star, riffs on a reversed-race Othello, Native-American trickster-tales. Things unsaid, things suggested and hinted at. Border-discourse. Border-crossing discourse. Border-art. The digression as side-track, hidden trail, Coltrane solo. A text that is scattered and scattering, running from something, refusing to be captured.
''I know there's a lot of y'all that ain't used to hearing conversations that jumps back and forth between real time, the past, the future and virtual time. . . . 'Cause a lot of them novels you reads, them narrators always explains to you where they is.''
And
“Some of y’all listeners confuses me when I’m talking to you. You wants me to clarify this and wants me to clarify that and wants me to clarify where I am and wants me to clarify who I am. And many of y’all don’t know who Mosquito is from Nadine, and who Jane and Sojourner is when I’m telling y’all I’m all of them. Ain’t I told y’all that? Contradictions in reality don’t mean it ain’t real. Maybe it’s some of y’all who don’t know who y’all is and needs to clarify yourself. I’m just kidding with y’all. I don’t mind clarifying what peoples needs to know. Maybe modern stories just looks at theyselves, but I always prefers the storytellers that looks at them they’s talking to, and acknowledges what other peoples needs to know. I ain’t gonna tell y’all all my business, though. I don’t play that.
What does it mean to compare the current patters of Latino migration from south to north to the 19thc African-American journeys north on the Underground Railroad? And what about the often forgotten afro-Mexican communities?
"I know they had that slavery in Mexico same as the US and a lot of them Africans that didn't escape to Canada escaped to Mexico. I even heard tales of Africans jumping off the slave ships headed for the United States and swimming to Mexico, 'cause they abolished that slavery in Mexico earlier than in the States.”
And the complex power structures of the legal, bureaucratic side of the immigration process?
I know what some of them folders got in them, 'cause they is writing on the outside. They is also a filing cabinet that has writing on the outside:
Immigration and Naturalization Forms
Applications for Nonresident Alien's Canadian border crossing
Immigrant Applications for Special Immigration
Applications for Employment Authorization
Visa Waivers
Applications for Naturalization
Applications for Asylum
Citizenship Applications
Fingerprint Charts
Sample Green Cards
Employment Papers & Authorizations
Employment Letters
Sample Visas
Affidavits of Support
Petitions
Adjustment of Status Applications
Supporting Documents
INS Submissions Addresses
Sample Forms
Booklets
Guides to Citizenship Examinations
And freedom, when it comes to the novel, to the text, what does that mean for the novel form? What does (or, more properly, can) a completely free text look like? And are we entitled to critique such a text when it does not do what we expect it to?
"I be wondering if it be possible to tell a true jazz story, where the peoples that listens can just enter the story and start telling it and adding things wherever they wants. The story would provide the jazz foundation, the subject, but they be improvising around that subject or them subjects and be composing they own jazz story. If it be a book, they be reading it and start telling it theyselves whiles they's reading. For example, if they gets to a part of the book where I talks about my daddy, say if I was the storyteller, then they ain't just have to read about my daddy, they can start talking about they own daddy or other people daddy or even they Spiritual Daddy . . . anyplace in the novel they wants to integrate they own story or the stories of the peoples they knows, so they be reading and composing for theyselves, and writing in the margins and ain't just have to write in the margins, 'cause I ain't wanting my listeners to just be reserved to the margins, but they writing between the lines, and even between the words, and be adding they own adjectives here and there... And they ain't even have to names the peoples same as I names them. Maybe they's got they own names for the people. Like maybe I have a character name Nadine like myself and they be saying Nadine that ain't the proper name for that woman. Course I ain't want nobody to just name me who they wants, even if I were a character in a novel. But some peoples is like that. They names you who they wants anyway. I ain't know if I wants them peoples to be changing names, though they can compose around the themes, but they could still bring in they own multiple perspectives everywhere in that novel, and they own freedom."
This is a very good book indeed, and one that those of you more comfortable with non-traditional novel forms should not have any trouble with. If you struggle with digression, with lack of narrative structure, with a text that may well frustrate at times, then this may not float your boat. Personally, I think it a work that clearly evidences a great literary talent. If I were to put in on a shelf with some it shares some characteristics with, that shelf would include Leon Forrest's Divine Days, Miss Macintosh My Darling, and Vollmann's Imperial (subject matter more than style really, though WTV can digress with the best of ‘em). And when it comes to digression, are not Sterne and Montaigne, for example, proof of its legitimacy as a structural and stylistic device? I could not disagree more strongly with the, usually good, Tom LeClair who called it "aggressively digressive, frequently vapid, and stupifyingly repetitive". I am not quite sure how, for example, one can be "aggressive" in one's digression, not least in a text where that digression is very obviously necessary for a minority to remain free enough to speak properly. Running to evade oppression is not an aggressive act. And vapid? Sure there are some not exactly complex bits of analysis going on at times, but they always offer something of interest. And, finally, as to the repetition, well, as someone who has read Making of Americans, this is not what I would call a repetitive text. There is also actually very little repetition at all, as far as I can see. There is a return to previously discussed incidents, though this return expands and alters the original, and a return to and expansion upon, thoughts, in the same way that a jazz solo will return to melodic lines and break them open, repeat them, reverse them etc. Reading his review I have that strange sensation of feeling like we read entirely different books.
Anyway, I refer to his review just to make sure you know what you are getting in to if you give this one a try. I think it very much deserves a wider readership, and am sure that there are others who will enjoy it as much as I did, but am also aware that many of you may not...Hopefully my quotes will give you a sense of it. If I am honest it probably sits somewhere between a 4 and a 5 star read, but with books that have fallen off the radar I tend to round upwards...
I fully intend to read her other books, which seem to be much better known. Her life, and the events she was going through while writing this novel, may also be of interest in determining one's interpretation of it (though I believe any text stands on its own). If you are interested, I would suggest reading the following: https://www.nytimes.com/1998/07/19/ma...
A better, and more helpful review of the novel than mine can be found here:
https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text...
Here is the first paragraph:
”I was on one of them little border roads in South Texas, you know them little narrow roads that runs along the border between South Texas and northern Mexico. Maybe that Diary Mart Road, probably that Diary Mart Road, though all them border roads in them border towns looks alike. On either side of the border. Brownsville, Laredo, Del Rio. All them border towns. I usedta travel into Brownsville in Cameron County a lot because it one of them international seaport towns. That’s when I was transporting electronics, apparel, and transporting for the shrimping industry. This that Diary Mart Road, though. Your source for superior tanning products, one of them roadside signs say. It’s got them Southern California types in they bikinis showing off they tans. Another roadside sign advertising cactus candy and got a picture of a buffalo and some cactus. I’s got me a teacup I got from a trade show that have got a handle that is in the shape of a cactus and resembles that exact same cactus. I mean the handle of it ain’t a ordinary teacup handle, it’s a cactus, so when you holds the teacup you’s got to hold the cactus. I think that that cactus is the archetypal cactus, ’cause I has seen more cactus like that in them ads than I has in the Southwest itself. I calls it Arizona cactus, but I don’t know its true name. Another sign advertising Brownsville as a tourist attraction. It tells you that Brownsville ain’t just Brownsville, but it got all the amenities for tourism, that tourists don’t got to go to Acapulco or even Tijuana, that they can come to Brownsville. I try to think of the Kiowa word for Brownsville, or maybe it the Kiowa word for Sweetwater I’m trying to think of. Sound like the name of somebody, like the names that they gives people in the South, though, that Kiowa word.”
Whether or not the idea of 600 pages of this voice appeals to you is something for you to consider. I would note, however, that it is easy to skim over the very complex and subtle stuff going on even in this short paragraph. It is too easy to make assumptions about shallowness when one is not reading what we are taught is an "intelligent" voice.
Conversations and digressions, letters, extracts from plays, leaflets from the Daughters of Nzingha, the adventures of Mosquito’s childhood friend “Monkey Bread”, who works as a personal assistant to a Hollywood star, riffs on a reversed-race Othello, Native-American trickster-tales. Things unsaid, things suggested and hinted at. Border-discourse. Border-crossing discourse. Border-art. The digression as side-track, hidden trail, Coltrane solo. A text that is scattered and scattering, running from something, refusing to be captured.
''I know there's a lot of y'all that ain't used to hearing conversations that jumps back and forth between real time, the past, the future and virtual time. . . . 'Cause a lot of them novels you reads, them narrators always explains to you where they is.''
And
“Some of y’all listeners confuses me when I’m talking to you. You wants me to clarify this and wants me to clarify that and wants me to clarify where I am and wants me to clarify who I am. And many of y’all don’t know who Mosquito is from Nadine, and who Jane and Sojourner is when I’m telling y’all I’m all of them. Ain’t I told y’all that? Contradictions in reality don’t mean it ain’t real. Maybe it’s some of y’all who don’t know who y’all is and needs to clarify yourself. I’m just kidding with y’all. I don’t mind clarifying what peoples needs to know. Maybe modern stories just looks at theyselves, but I always prefers the storytellers that looks at them they’s talking to, and acknowledges what other peoples needs to know. I ain’t gonna tell y’all all my business, though. I don’t play that.
What does it mean to compare the current patters of Latino migration from south to north to the 19thc African-American journeys north on the Underground Railroad? And what about the often forgotten afro-Mexican communities?
"I know they had that slavery in Mexico same as the US and a lot of them Africans that didn't escape to Canada escaped to Mexico. I even heard tales of Africans jumping off the slave ships headed for the United States and swimming to Mexico, 'cause they abolished that slavery in Mexico earlier than in the States.”
And the complex power structures of the legal, bureaucratic side of the immigration process?
I know what some of them folders got in them, 'cause they is writing on the outside. They is also a filing cabinet that has writing on the outside:
Immigration and Naturalization Forms
Applications for Nonresident Alien's Canadian border crossing
Immigrant Applications for Special Immigration
Applications for Employment Authorization
Visa Waivers
Applications for Naturalization
Applications for Asylum
Citizenship Applications
Fingerprint Charts
Sample Green Cards
Employment Papers & Authorizations
Employment Letters
Sample Visas
Affidavits of Support
Petitions
Adjustment of Status Applications
Supporting Documents
INS Submissions Addresses
Sample Forms
Booklets
Guides to Citizenship Examinations
And freedom, when it comes to the novel, to the text, what does that mean for the novel form? What does (or, more properly, can) a completely free text look like? And are we entitled to critique such a text when it does not do what we expect it to?
"I be wondering if it be possible to tell a true jazz story, where the peoples that listens can just enter the story and start telling it and adding things wherever they wants. The story would provide the jazz foundation, the subject, but they be improvising around that subject or them subjects and be composing they own jazz story. If it be a book, they be reading it and start telling it theyselves whiles they's reading. For example, if they gets to a part of the book where I talks about my daddy, say if I was the storyteller, then they ain't just have to read about my daddy, they can start talking about they own daddy or other people daddy or even they Spiritual Daddy . . . anyplace in the novel they wants to integrate they own story or the stories of the peoples they knows, so they be reading and composing for theyselves, and writing in the margins and ain't just have to write in the margins, 'cause I ain't wanting my listeners to just be reserved to the margins, but they writing between the lines, and even between the words, and be adding they own adjectives here and there... And they ain't even have to names the peoples same as I names them. Maybe they's got they own names for the people. Like maybe I have a character name Nadine like myself and they be saying Nadine that ain't the proper name for that woman. Course I ain't want nobody to just name me who they wants, even if I were a character in a novel. But some peoples is like that. They names you who they wants anyway. I ain't know if I wants them peoples to be changing names, though they can compose around the themes, but they could still bring in they own multiple perspectives everywhere in that novel, and they own freedom."
This is a very good book indeed, and one that those of you more comfortable with non-traditional novel forms should not have any trouble with. If you struggle with digression, with lack of narrative structure, with a text that may well frustrate at times, then this may not float your boat. Personally, I think it a work that clearly evidences a great literary talent. If I were to put in on a shelf with some it shares some characteristics with, that shelf would include Leon Forrest's Divine Days, Miss Macintosh My Darling, and Vollmann's Imperial (subject matter more than style really, though WTV can digress with the best of ‘em). And when it comes to digression, are not Sterne and Montaigne, for example, proof of its legitimacy as a structural and stylistic device? I could not disagree more strongly with the, usually good, Tom LeClair who called it "aggressively digressive, frequently vapid, and stupifyingly repetitive". I am not quite sure how, for example, one can be "aggressive" in one's digression, not least in a text where that digression is very obviously necessary for a minority to remain free enough to speak properly. Running to evade oppression is not an aggressive act. And vapid? Sure there are some not exactly complex bits of analysis going on at times, but they always offer something of interest. And, finally, as to the repetition, well, as someone who has read Making of Americans, this is not what I would call a repetitive text. There is also actually very little repetition at all, as far as I can see. There is a return to previously discussed incidents, though this return expands and alters the original, and a return to and expansion upon, thoughts, in the same way that a jazz solo will return to melodic lines and break them open, repeat them, reverse them etc. Reading his review I have that strange sensation of feeling like we read entirely different books.
Anyway, I refer to his review just to make sure you know what you are getting in to if you give this one a try. I think it very much deserves a wider readership, and am sure that there are others who will enjoy it as much as I did, but am also aware that many of you may not...Hopefully my quotes will give you a sense of it. If I am honest it probably sits somewhere between a 4 and a 5 star read, but with books that have fallen off the radar I tend to round upwards...
I fully intend to read her other books, which seem to be much better known. Her life, and the events she was going through while writing this novel, may also be of interest in determining one's interpretation of it (though I believe any text stands on its own). If you are interested, I would suggest reading the following: https://www.nytimes.com/1998/07/19/ma...
A better, and more helpful review of the novel than mine can be found here:
https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text...
December 27, 2023
Top 10 of 2023 for me—
No matter what your feelings are about the subject matter—which, ehhh, is Life—I guarantee you that you’ve never read anything like it. Jones so inhabits her titular protagonist that I found myself wondering if she transcribed conversations she’d had in character. I mean, this is DEEPLY idiomatic language, and across more than 600-pages there isn’t a single seam of Gayl, or at least the author that one-two’d the champ with her younger flurry, anywhere to be found. She is less writing a character than functioning as its medium.
All of which leads, wonderfully, to a book about love. That good love. That positive, affirming, confirming, but not constricting love. Not Love as yoke: Love as actions by the likeminded to ease that load. It’s about womenfriends (girls can only have friends?), it’s about menfriends (only boys don’t cry and can have friends until puberty?). No, it’s not a monograph on polemics; I just can’t believe that anyone wouldn’t be positively thrumming with the conviction that we each couldn’t do better by the end of this brick.
Bonus Easter Ovoids: Jones lists about 25 writers that she’s slyly recommending her reader to check out. I have and, hot shit, just even more pollination from this bug that bit me.
No matter what your feelings are about the subject matter—which, ehhh, is Life—I guarantee you that you’ve never read anything like it. Jones so inhabits her titular protagonist that I found myself wondering if she transcribed conversations she’d had in character. I mean, this is DEEPLY idiomatic language, and across more than 600-pages there isn’t a single seam of Gayl, or at least the author that one-two’d the champ with her younger flurry, anywhere to be found. She is less writing a character than functioning as its medium.
All of which leads, wonderfully, to a book about love. That good love. That positive, affirming, confirming, but not constricting love. Not Love as yoke: Love as actions by the likeminded to ease that load. It’s about womenfriends (girls can only have friends?), it’s about menfriends (only boys don’t cry and can have friends until puberty?). No, it’s not a monograph on polemics; I just can’t believe that anyone wouldn’t be positively thrumming with the conviction that we each couldn’t do better by the end of this brick.
Bonus Easter Ovoids: Jones lists about 25 writers that she’s slyly recommending her reader to check out. I have and, hot shit, just even more pollination from this bug that bit me.
June 4, 2012
I can never say I liked a book when halfway through I'm praying that its over. BUT, I can also see someone rating this book 5 stars and be fine with that. This book takes chances and is SOO intelligent. The authors calls it a jazz poem, fiction of fiction and is written in conversational style. It talks to the reader, its poetic and it breaks "literature's" boundaries. Its also repetitive, sometimes boring, off in different directions that circle back onto themselves, and too long by half.
Mosquito is actually a very tall truck driving Black woman driving a route along America's southwest. She gets involved in the immigrant justice movement, falls in love with a priest/not priest/cia agent/border patrol/??? She talks directly to the reader and has time to include newsletters, songs, and poems from her real (Gayl Jones actual author) mother in the text. In other words its a mismash of Southwest magic realism, poetry, fiction that is not fiction but may be fictional fiction...you get my drift??? The author often interrupts the story to ask the reader if they understand that they are reading something other than a story...my answer is yes and it has become tiresome.
I must give G. Jones props for trying to write more than just a book but something that involves all art. Perhaps if this was published today (instead of 1998) she could include a dvd of multimedia.
I wish there was a way to say that if you like a first person, conversational story that will go off on a tangent at any moment and ultimately leads to a story that can be condensed into half the pages you've read but touches on social justice issues and women's rights and immigrants rights, social inequities..like a lot of Shakespeare...I recognize the brilliance but I don't read it for pleasure..
Mosquito is actually a very tall truck driving Black woman driving a route along America's southwest. She gets involved in the immigrant justice movement, falls in love with a priest/not priest/cia agent/border patrol/??? She talks directly to the reader and has time to include newsletters, songs, and poems from her real (Gayl Jones actual author) mother in the text. In other words its a mismash of Southwest magic realism, poetry, fiction that is not fiction but may be fictional fiction...you get my drift??? The author often interrupts the story to ask the reader if they understand that they are reading something other than a story...my answer is yes and it has become tiresome.
I must give G. Jones props for trying to write more than just a book but something that involves all art. Perhaps if this was published today (instead of 1998) she could include a dvd of multimedia.
I wish there was a way to say that if you like a first person, conversational story that will go off on a tangent at any moment and ultimately leads to a story that can be condensed into half the pages you've read but touches on social justice issues and women's rights and immigrants rights, social inequities..like a lot of Shakespeare...I recognize the brilliance but I don't read it for pleasure..
August 3, 2018
One of my favorite novels. I love the language and humor of the African American, female protagonist, Mosquito. Her migration across the American West reminds me of when only white male protagonists made such liberating treks in 19th century literature. Mosquito, however, is one of a kind. If you enjoy audiobooks, I happen to love the reader for Gayl Jones’s Mosquito and The Healing (which is another favorite of mine; same badass, female protagonist who is a healer to boot!)
May 30, 2013
Decades ago I found and bought Gayle Jones' book Corregidora in a National Women's History Project catalog. While I no longer remember the book, I never forgot the author. So when a book club offered Mosquito in 1998 or 1999, I bought it. It stayed on my shelves all these years until I picked it up on a whim. I am overwhelmed by Ms Jones' creation.
It's a large book, being over 600 pages. While the title character experiences changes over the course of the book, she does not tell her stories in a A-to-B-to-C manner. This may drive some readers away (one Amazon book reviewer gave up after 20 pages), but I fell in love with Mosquito and her manner of story-telling. This is the second time I've used the word "story" and for good reason. Mosquito tells her thoughts, her opinions, stories about herself, her friends, lovers, and acquaintances, but she doesn't tell everything. Ostensibly, this book is about her accidental acquaintance with the Sanctuary movement (an Underground Railroad for would-be refugees) and her development within that movement. But it's "about" so much more. Mosquito ponders race, history, freedom, friendship and all other manner of things. I could listen to her all day.
I don't know what else to say about this book, except that I figuratively fell into this book and Mosquito's world. She became a very real person and a great friend. It's a challenging book written in the language of a South Texas by-way-of-Kentucky woman, but it's a challenge well worth accepting.
It's a large book, being over 600 pages. While the title character experiences changes over the course of the book, she does not tell her stories in a A-to-B-to-C manner. This may drive some readers away (one Amazon book reviewer gave up after 20 pages), but I fell in love with Mosquito and her manner of story-telling. This is the second time I've used the word "story" and for good reason. Mosquito tells her thoughts, her opinions, stories about herself, her friends, lovers, and acquaintances, but she doesn't tell everything. Ostensibly, this book is about her accidental acquaintance with the Sanctuary movement (an Underground Railroad for would-be refugees) and her development within that movement. But it's "about" so much more. Mosquito ponders race, history, freedom, friendship and all other manner of things. I could listen to her all day.
I don't know what else to say about this book, except that I figuratively fell into this book and Mosquito's world. She became a very real person and a great friend. It's a challenging book written in the language of a South Texas by-way-of-Kentucky woman, but it's a challenge well worth accepting.
August 5, 2020
You talking ’bout race being a myth. Well, it seem like to me that language is a myth too.I loved the beginning of this massive novel, but as the book unfolded, it seemed to me to have certain weaknesses that I couldn't overlook. I love the idea and ambition of the book (without the "bitch" in it). But I think part of the whole idea of the novel was to show the myth of certain types of speech as inherently intelligent or dumb. In the first chapter of this, we get the best example of this thesis, because we hear Mosquito talking to us in this southern Black vernacular, but she's also clearly intelligent and funny as well.
You know, before I met you, he said, I thought people that talked like you, you know, who used the vernacular, so to speak, although I use some myself every now and then, were unintelligent people, but with you, your intelligence shines through, even though you speak corrupted English.As the novel progresses, though, it feels like Gayl Jones shoots herself in the foot by making Mosquito talk SOOO much. It's not her vernacular that makes her sound un-intelligent, it's her repetition, her need to say every single thing over and over again in detail like she's explaining it to a child. So I get the impression that either Mosquito is not intelligent (again, not because of her vernacular) or that she thinks we, her readers, are extremely stupid. There are also stretches that are really hard to follow because you're not sure who's talking (this is sometimes on purpose because she wants the voices to flow into each other like a river of different vernaculars, and I get that, but it's a bit annoying too).
On top of that, there is another flaw, which is that the novel is primarily concerned with racial justice, sexual equality, and progressive thought. Which is a bold and fine objective, except that every little thing that Mosquito talks about ends up tying into one of these themes in a way that seems forced and a bit like we're being preached to. Like the agenda seems to pop up behind every sentence in a way that doesn't seem natural.
I remember reading that preachifying, though, and thinking why they keep all that preachifying in that book, because it seem like to me it would have been a better book without all that preachifying.Normally I am very much against "show don't tell" because I think the rule is stupid. It's not "show don't tell" it's "show don't tell badly". Creative writing workshops always ignore that part, because when told well, in lucid and exacting prose, telling can be phenomenal. However, in this book, I really felt like a little more show could have benefitted. Just because the telling had very little impetus behind it, and was way too repetitive.
If she goes into the concept of stereotypes one more time, explaining how sometimes stereotypes are true but her friend Delgadina says that stereotypes even when true can be harmful blah bla blah oh wait, didn't she already say this stereotype rant or some variation of it 100 times before?
I can understand if she just talks a lot to us, her readers. But then there are these parts where she just meets some new character, and they mention a name "Mickey" in passing, there's very little chance it's the same Mickey that she knows (though it probably is, given the way the plot works sometimes through coincidence), but she hears the name Mickey and she's like "I also have a friend named Mickey but she goes by Miguelita and..." then she talks for like 3 pages straight at this new friend who just mentioned the name Mickey. I mean who does that? It seems unrealistic and makes her out to be socially inept. If I met someone at a party who ranted at me for 10 minutes straight about her friend who I've never met, based only on the fact that her friend has the same name as someone I knew and mentioned off hand, then I'd be like "see ya later!"
In conclusion, I loved the beginning and the potential of the novel. But by 44% in my ebook, I gave up because I couldn't take Mosquito's way of talking down at me, or maybe just having no idea that I don't need to be lectured to about race (at least not the SAME lecture) 100 times to kinda sorta get it. This was an interesting literary experiment, and I'm definitely curious what Gayl Jones's other books are like, but I've gotta leave it unfinished. If it were shorter, I'd finish it, but 300+ more pages of this is too much for me now, given how much other literature is out there (the novel is 616 pages long!!!).
There are some gems hidden in here though. I don't want you to think there aren't, so I'm going leave you with some quotes:
"Them outlaws that do they outlawing under the cover of law is the outlaws I’m talking about. They’s the outlaws that oughta be outlawed. They talks about them outlaw nations, but every nation is a outlaw for its own interests."
"And them abuses is going on right in America. They’s peeing on your head right here in America and telling you it’s rain."
"I think they call them prairie foxes, don’t ya? A lot of them prairie animals they just stick a prairie on the front of they name and they got the animal. They even got prairie oysters, though I don’t know how they can have a oyster of the prairie. There’s a band from the Southwest, I think, that calls theyselves the Prairie Oysters. I wonder if they’s aphrodisiacs like them other oysters."
"That’s why they’s got they hero songs and stories—the idea of who they is. I might be descended from a king or queen myself, or some of them African noblemen and women. But what if I ain’t? Seems to me if you’s a true African, you’s just as proud if you’s descended from the common African man or woman. They’s some of us that’s descended from them European kings and queens. Them that wants to talk kings and queens."
"Of course they’s them that wants to make American a purified language, like them French purists, ’cause them French is supposed to be the most purified purists about they language, even them African writers who writes in French have commented about the purified purity of the French language, and thinks that them African writers that writes in English have got more freedom, and they’s talking about the Englishman’s English, but true American is every language."
“I be wondering if it be possible to tell a true jazz story, where the peoples that listens can just enter the story and start telling it and adding things wherever they wants. The story would provide the jazz foundation, the subject, but they be improvising around that subject or them subjects and be composing they own jazz story. If it be a book, they be reading it and start telling it theyselves whiles they’s reading. For example, if they gets to a part of the book where I talks about my daddy, say if I was the storyteller, then they ain’t just have to read about my daddy, they can start talking about they own daddy or other people daddy or even they Spiritual Daddy or if I be talking about my real mama or my Spiritual Mama, if I be the storyteller myself of such a novel, they could start talking about they own real mamas and they Spiritual Mamas and maybe they own mama and they Spiritual Mama is the same mama or anyplace in the novel they wants to integrate they own story or the stories of the peoples they knows, so they be reading and composing for theyselves, and writing in the margins and ain’t just have to write in the margins, ’cause I ain’t wanting my listeners to just be reserved to the margins, but they writing between the lines, and even between the words, and be adding they own adjectives here and there, and if I ain’t described something they wants described, they be describing it they ownselves, and be composers they ownself. And they ain’t even have to read the novel word for word ’cause they be as much creators of the word theyselves. And they ain’t even have to name the peoples same as I names them. Maybe they’s got they own names for the people."
September 30, 2023
This novel is so epic while being so small. Jones takes on an entire process of processing. This is the way to write without pause or without edit. How do we think and work through life? We ramble and repeat and reorganize reality.
This is a novel experimenting with time, language, and the self.
This is a novel experimenting with time, language, and the self.
November 27, 2022
Should be canonical. A lyrical slipstream/polyvocal work in the mind of Mosquito, truck driver. Glorious and rich. Includes a play(!!) embedded within the book.
February 27, 2008
This is probably one of my favourite books. gayle jones invents her own language to accompany the voyage of mosquito. Sanctuary and immigration.... highly recommend this book
December 31, 2008
fab stream-of-consciousness about black woman truck driver getting involved with migration and social justice issues on the US/Mexico border.
August 27, 2014
It's been at least a couple of years since I read this book, but I remember I loved it and thought about it a long time after!
June 6, 2025
2.5/5
I first encountered Jones through Corregidora back in 2017 and was more than a little blown away. Recognizing the pitfalls inherent in relying on a one hit wonder likely sourced through good-intentions-pave-the-road-to-hell (and not the revolutionary queer kind) 500 Great Books by Women, I picked this up in 2020 and finally got an excuse to pull it out for an extended sojourn (ha) through the US Southwest and Mexico and all that settler state jazz dipping its finger into every pie on the continent of Turtle Island. Unfortunately, just as one tends to remember the one criticism out of a handful of critiques, six hundred plus pages has a habit of both multiplying and magnifying the flaws, Talk about an oscillating reading experience. The closest books I can establish this work's proximity to are Miss MacIntosh, My Darling and Almanac of the Dead, and that's more for carving out a range of extremes than straightforward compare/contrast. Cause look, I see and respect what Jones is doing here, and every so often I was able to actually get into the flow and instinctively appreciate the construction, the deconstruction, and the breaking of the limits of the kyriarchical hegemony as executed through the written word, from privileging it over the oral tradition to calcifying it in the halls of academia and the publishing industry. However, and you can blame it on my chemo brain if you like (I certainly like, as while I finished in May, the side effects, including brain fog, can go on for a year), I spent this text more bored, annoyed, and glazed over than otherwise, and considering how many days I skipped and then made up for in reading this, I can't say I actually liked this overall. Considering the debacle over Palmares, I'm not too keen to give Jones a third time's the charm treatment even with her Pulitzer finalist The Unicorn Woman. As such, I'll be letting the author lie for the time being, but I wouldn't mind getting back into the landscape she riddled and rhapsodized about, albeit a tad more indigenous and/or queerer, whichever floats by my interest first.
I first encountered Jones through Corregidora back in 2017 and was more than a little blown away. Recognizing the pitfalls inherent in relying on a one hit wonder likely sourced through good-intentions-pave-the-road-to-hell (and not the revolutionary queer kind) 500 Great Books by Women, I picked this up in 2020 and finally got an excuse to pull it out for an extended sojourn (ha) through the US Southwest and Mexico and all that settler state jazz dipping its finger into every pie on the continent of Turtle Island. Unfortunately, just as one tends to remember the one criticism out of a handful of critiques, six hundred plus pages has a habit of both multiplying and magnifying the flaws, Talk about an oscillating reading experience. The closest books I can establish this work's proximity to are Miss MacIntosh, My Darling and Almanac of the Dead, and that's more for carving out a range of extremes than straightforward compare/contrast. Cause look, I see and respect what Jones is doing here, and every so often I was able to actually get into the flow and instinctively appreciate the construction, the deconstruction, and the breaking of the limits of the kyriarchical hegemony as executed through the written word, from privileging it over the oral tradition to calcifying it in the halls of academia and the publishing industry. However, and you can blame it on my chemo brain if you like (I certainly like, as while I finished in May, the side effects, including brain fog, can go on for a year), I spent this text more bored, annoyed, and glazed over than otherwise, and considering how many days I skipped and then made up for in reading this, I can't say I actually liked this overall. Considering the debacle over Palmares, I'm not too keen to give Jones a third time's the charm treatment even with her Pulitzer finalist The Unicorn Woman. As such, I'll be letting the author lie for the time being, but I wouldn't mind getting back into the landscape she riddled and rhapsodized about, albeit a tad more indigenous and/or queerer, whichever floats by my interest first.
May 24, 2022
Overall, the was a fascinating book that I did really enjoy reading. This book varied so much from Jones´s other works. The raw, ephemeral spirit lurking in such books as Corregida seemed to have come to life. Here, however, Jones has written a powerfully hopeful "jazz novel"; improvisations, repetitions, and syncopies round out the free-form genius of her fractured. The main character, Sojourner Jane Nadine Johnson (Mosquito) is among the most interesting characters I´ve ever had the pleasure to read about. Mosquito's intelligence is evident through her language, a dialect with 19th-century inflections peppered with polysyllabic words and references to the philosophical concepts Mosquito has feverishly accumulated in her compelling quest for knowledge and wisdom.
I found that Jones´s way of writing is not one that makes her books easy to read. The character is in control and the book seems to be not the telling of a story, but the recording of the neurological activities of an intriguing woman.
Though it is not for those easily distracted, this wonderfully inventive book begs to be read aloud.
I found that Jones´s way of writing is not one that makes her books easy to read. The character is in control and the book seems to be not the telling of a story, but the recording of the neurological activities of an intriguing woman.
Though it is not for those easily distracted, this wonderfully inventive book begs to be read aloud.
May 29, 2025
I feel like I could flip back to any point of the 600 pages of this book and be like “oh yeah wow that part, nice” and smile and think fondly of it, and I just feel like that’s kinda like winning the triple crown 200 times in a row
October 25, 2022
Wow! This is an amazing, difficult, fun, engrossing novel that by the end was totally worth it. Don’t believe the reviews describing the story line as about the new Underground Railroad and immigrant coming from Latin America. That is there, yes, but it is really the mechanism to host a brilliant dive into identity, relations, the stories we tell each other and ourselves, and how we tell those stories. Sit on the porch with Mosquito and let her take you on a ride as she delves into what it means to be American, native, independent, in love. Let her share hers and Delgadina’s ideas on history, writing, movie stars, and why Sidney Poitier never had a black lover in the movies. When I was done with this book, I literally missed sitting with Mosquito and having her tell me stories. It’s not an easy read, but the style is completely unique, brilliant, and in the end you might want to say to yourself, “Why do so few people know about Gayl Jones.”
December 17, 2018
The book was packaged as having a sort-of oral storytelling style. I found it was more like stream of consciousness, where every passing thought from the narrator's mind is transcribed. I liked the narrator's voice, so I'll just describe this one as too much of a good thing.
December 26, 2014
Boring, disjointed.
dnf
May 13, 2020I wanted so badly to love this book, but it's just way too long-winded and tangential for me to finish. I made it about halfway through, and even this far, I've only detected an inkling of a plot. That's not the kind of book I want to read, especially one that's over 600 pages, but I'm not going to say that this book is bad because that would be doing it a disservice. I have no doubt that Gayl Jones is a brilliant writer; many of her descriptions are gorgeous, and Mosquito, though not the most compelling narrator, sees the world through a nonjudgmental lens, which helps her to tackle issues of identity with so much empathy. The characters feel real, and even the landscape comes to life.
If only it weren't such a drag to get through at times. I'm going to have give this one a second chance eventually; maybe I'll have the same reaction to it that I did to Absalom, Absalom! .
If only it weren't such a drag to get through at times. I'm going to have give this one a second chance eventually; maybe I'll have the same reaction to it that I did to Absalom, Absalom! .
October 18, 2025
Stream of consciousness tour de force of Black American English with an eye toward vernacular syntax and diction, whose central theme is really language itself, its use, acquisition, social context, and power dynamics. How is communication even possible? It seems like a miracle given the nature of language. But the perspective here isn't pessimistic, moreso experiential. We follow Sojourner or Mosquito, who drives truck. There is an unfolding plot regarding border politics which is interesting as well. That solidarity remains possible in the world of the book despite the convolutions and complexities of language is a compelling proposal indicating, perhaps, that a hidden unity may underlie the surface differences of expression, or from another tack, that we conceal the radically socially constructed nature of everything from ourselves in order to cope. There are moments one cannot cope with the novel, in the sense that it flags, but overall I enjoy it and recommend it.
January 22, 2023
I received a copy from a Goodreads giveaway.
What a long read. At times I laughed a little and there were some interesting points of thought. Overall this book dragged on and on. My interest could only last 30-50 pages at a time and then I had to put it down. It took some determination to finish.
The book is from Mosquito's (her nickname) perspective and the whole time she is storytelling. She goes off on tangents and then comes back to the point so many pages later. Sometimes in her storytelling I was wondering "what is going on here?"
This is a long one and in my opinion not worth the time. Pick up something else to read.
What a long read. At times I laughed a little and there were some interesting points of thought. Overall this book dragged on and on. My interest could only last 30-50 pages at a time and then I had to put it down. It took some determination to finish.
The book is from Mosquito's (her nickname) perspective and the whole time she is storytelling. She goes off on tangents and then comes back to the point so many pages later. Sometimes in her storytelling I was wondering "what is going on here?"
This is a long one and in my opinion not worth the time. Pick up something else to read.
October 22, 2024
As a Gayl Jones fanatic I appreciated this. As Greg Tate said, this is not a synopsizable book and it defies so much of what we expect a book/story to do. It took me 4 months (down for prolly 3 bc of frustration) to finish but the highs were so high. It’s a thrillingly hard book to read that sometimes annoys you and sometimes enthralls you in such a particular way. Auditory perfection. So much literary theory in here. Or rather mosquitos theory of “the story” which I would argue Jones shares. It’s a great book but being a Gayl Jones fanatic makes it much more fruitful bc of all the allusions to other/earlier writings and ideas. So much to say but I’ll stop here.
July 22, 2023
Remarkable book. Often winding and can be hard to keep track of which layer of the story you're in but as a book uninterested in plot, Jones knows what she's doing.
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August 2, 2007I love this book, even though I've been "currently reading" it since 2000.
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