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

• Author
• Gayl Jones, Helene Atwan

• Format
• paperback

• Pages
• 624

• Publisher
• Beacon Press

• Language
• english

• ISBN
• 9780807083475

• Genres
• fiction, race, school, american

• Release date
• 2000