Product Description

A delightful surprise, Faulkner wrote his second novel "for the sake of writing because it was fun." Mosquitoes centers around a colorful assortment of passengers, out on a boating excursion from New Orleans. The rich and the aspiring, social butterflies and dissolute dilettantes are all easy game for Faulkner's barbed wit in this engaging high-spirited novel which offers a fascinating glimpse of Faulkner as a young artist."It approaches in the first half and reaches in the second half a brilliance that you can rightfully expect only in the writings of a few men. It is full of the fine kind of swift and lusty writing that comes from a healthy, fresh pen."--Lillian Hellman, New York Herald Tribune .

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #656202 in Books
• Published on: 1996-12-17
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

From Scientific American
Faulkner has a sense of character; he has a sense of humor; he has sense of style; and for his new novel, Mosquitoes, he has found an amusing and . . . original setting.

Review
Reaches . . . a brilliance that you can rightfully expect only in the writings of a few men. -- The New York Herald Tribune, Lillian Hellman

From the Publisher
7 1.5-hour cassettes

Customer Reviews

Drunken artists on problematic pleasure cruise
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.

Not Yoknapatawpha, not for me
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.

Is what it is.
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.