She is able to enter each character from their own deepest place of privacy.” - Lambda Book Report “Mootoo’s ability to evoke a physical environment is so convincing that the reader can taste the grittiness of lime dust on her own lips.

We should watch where she travels next.” - The Globe and Mail “ writer with a generous spirit and a gift for storytelling. “A swirling cauldron of cross-generational history filled with violence, romance, aching beauty, and heart-breaking mystery.” - Sojourner “Reading Cereus Blooms at Night is like reading a dream, entering a strange but believable world in which unusual possibilities flower like the cereus itself: evocative, pervasive, sensuous.” - Books in Canada “This ethereal first novel employs myth and magic reminiscent of Isabel Allende.” - Out Magazine “Working with magic, grounded by psychological insight, Mootoo weaves a deft design of vivid and sensuous scenes.” - Quill & Quire Inside the grand sweep of the story are the finely tuned details which mark a brilliant storyteller.” - Jewelle Gomez “ language and characters seduce us away to a mythic place that is, by turns, as sweet as the first knowing of love and as hard as a callous blow. “The passion of the characters, their insistence to live, to find joy despite the tyranny under which they conduct their lives, makes Cereus Blooms at Night remarkable.” -Shyam Selvadurai, author of Funny Boy Mootoo creates a dense Asian-Caribbean world of buried secrets and desperate memories, a hothouse in which stories grow as lushly as flowers.” - Books in Canada Mala actively leaves nature to its devices, choosing not.“Dazzling. Eventually, Mala hums in harmony with the sounds of insects and bird calls around her, listening carefully to and 'gossip' with the creatures and foliage of her garden (127). The first part of the chapter describes the way this new communication alters her thinking patterns, with sentences evolving into image-based ideas that initially adhere to familiar syntax, but which eventually break down the very concepts of lexical conventions like sentences and words as 'unnecessary translation of the delight she experience' moving through the world and observing the birds and plants and insects around her (126).

Pages 126 through 130 - This chapter describes the period of Mala's life where she enters into a phase of not using language or words, entering instead into a new communion with her natural environment, freed from nomenclature.

Cereus blooms at night sparknotes