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The Blackwater Lightship - Reviews
Independent on Sunday
The Backwater Lightship is a courageous, passionately articulated
affirmation of the meaningfulness of human life, I believe that we shall
be reading and living with The Black water Lightship in twenty
years. I know of no novelist underfifty who is Colm Toibin Tóibín's
equal. In this his fourth book, his proses rises to heights of
extraordinary beauty
Lambda Book Report
Readers have come to expect as much from Tóibín,
but The Blackwater Lightship goes beyond his earlier work in its depth
and compassion. The novel delivers a graceful and moving meditation on loss,
obligation, and the nature of family. In an era of ever-more-rapid change,
Tóibín's radiant novel reminds us that some things are more
constant: love and frailty, and our human need for one another.
(From Elizabeth Flynn)
San Francisco Chronicle
Toibin allows us to penetrate the family's painful history and understand
its three generations of prickly women. He is a relentless diagnostician of
diseased personal dynamics.(Book Review 08/20/2000)
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Chicago Tribune Books
[A] seamless, mesmerizing whole--a swift and chilly narrative, infused with
bouts of unexpected humor that make it as unpredictable as it is powerful.
You look for the nuts and bolts of writing technique, and they're nowhere
in sight. What you get instead feels like direct access to half a dozen lives,
couched in a prose so spare and clear that you wonder what keeps it from being
plain--even as a pulse of urgency gives it continual lift. (08/13/2000)
Salon
In his fourth novel, Colm Toibin blends two of modern fiction's most repeated
motifs--the dysfunctional family brought together by AIDS and the wild,
changeable landscape of Ireland as a metaphor for its people. But the
commonness of the setup isn't a sign of complacency on the part of the author:
It's an indication of someone so at ease with the everyday he has no need of
theatrics.(08/22/2000)
Los Angeles Times Book Review
It's good to read Toibin's honest novels, in which human beings fail to forgive,
fail to understand. We spend so much of our lives in the dark, shouldn't literature
face this as squarely as we must? (09/03/2000)
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