Visiting Sri Lanka with Mosquito
A few weeks ago, three women born in three different countries met in Brooklyn to eat South Indian food, drink French wine, graze on Italian cookies, and discuss a book set in Sri Lanka.
Roma Tearne’s Mosquito was a different sort of choice for the Vicarious Reading Book Club. Neither newly released nor widely circulated nor highly awarded, it’s a book that’s a bit under-the-radar and tough to find online (not to mention an SEO nightmare – Google Books’ description of the book reads: “Highlights the physical characteristics, habitat, and life cycle of mosquitoes. Discusses control measures and includes illustrations”). In that sense, Mosquito is the first novel we’ve read that I never would have stumbled upon if not for the group.
It’s also a novel I cracked open with some skepticism, not because of its obscurity or even its awful purple cover, but because what little I knew about the book made it seem like a Sri Lankan Lolita. Set against a backdrop of the country’s recent civil war, Mosquito is the story of a romance between a writer named Theo and a young painter named Nulani. He’s a wealthy, worldly, and widowed British ex-pat; she’s an introverted and inexperienced high school student. Talk about a power imbalance.
But this book won me over despite that premise, largely on the strength of its beauty and thoughtfulness. On its surface, Mosquito has shades of ‘How Stella Got Her Groove Back:’ a broken character trades in modern life for the slow pace of the beach and discovers love and inspiration along the way. But Mosquito cuts much deeper than Terry McMillan’s chick lit – it’s a story, ultimately, about the pain of love and of being unloved. Characters are tortured not only by loneliness, but also by the vulnerability that comes from loving deeply. Watching as Theo and Nulani ricochet between different emotional states – opening themselves up, falling for each other, then shutting down to survive – made me think about love in my own life differently. Love isn’t expressed only through life’s highs, it’s also experienced in its lows – the dangers you fear, the separation you dread, the future you desperately desire to protect. And within that cerebral context, somehow Theo and Nulani’s May-December romance felt more pure than prurient.
Beyond being a book about love, this is also a book that nails this blog’s ‘prose and place’ theme. Mosquito revels in Sri Lanka’s lush coastal landscape – palms wilting in the heat, insects scuttling across tile, water glistening in the light of full moons, rain battering clapboard walls, and the sound of lapping tides. Life bends to the will of weather here (literally – still water begets mosquitos which spread malaria) and Tearne renders that weather as vividly as she does her human characters. At one point, for example, she describes the afternoon as “gelatinous with the heat.”
Additionally, the notion that where you live is a critical component of your identity and happiness courses through every page of Mosquito. It’s evident in how drawn Theo felt to Sri Lanka in spite of its looming dangers. It’s clear in the way Theo’s friend Rohan’s spirit died when he had to flee his home in Colombo for exile in Italy. And it feels particularly compelling when plot points hinge on the way place shapes us. For instance, Theo’s confidence that logic will prevail – something he learned living in London – serves only to hurt him in Sri Lanka, where logic holds no sway over unrest, war, and injustice.
I wasn’t alone in my love for this novel – both of my cookie-eating, wine-drinking book club companions were surprised and delighted by Mosquito too. While it didn’t make me want to catch the next plane to Sri Lanka (a book brimming with war, kidnapping, and murder tends to have that effect), it did make me want to hold the people I love a little closer. And for that feeling alone it’s worth searching through a million Amazon listings for books about actual mosquitos to find.