Book Reviews
Characters and their individual perception are what intrigue Woolf, not plot—and in Lighthouse she gives full rein to her modernist ideas: reality is subjective, life is transient, truth and certainty are unattainable. It is only art that offers an antidote to an ever changing, death-threatening world. What's the significance of the lighthouse? Good question.
A LitLovers LitPick (Oct '08)
Virginia Woolf stands as the chief figure of modernism in England and must be included with Joyce and Proust in the realization of experiments that have completely broken with tradition.
The New York Times
There are dozens of passages in which the secret revelations of men and women, especialy women, to the trifling events of life are rendered with convincing and elaborate subtlety. To have written them is to have surpassed...almost every contemporary novelist.
Saturday Review
(Audio version.) It's wondrous to listen to a fine reading of a long-loved novel. Leishman makes masterly use of volume, timbre and resonance to distinguish between characters and draw us into the emotional swings and vibrations of the internal musings of each. She creates not a new but a more nuanced reading, following the interwoven streams of consciousness in a British English that lends authenticity to each voice. Leishman swims smoothly through Woolf's sentences that ebb and flow with numerous parenthetical thoughts and fresh images. These passages are interspersed with quick, sharp, simple sentences that gain strength in contrast. Leishman also draws our attention to Woolf's poetic prose: her rhythms and images, her use of hard consonants in monosyllabic words in counterpoint to long, soft, dreamy words and phrases. To The Lighthouse plays back and forth between telescopic and microscopic views of nature and human nature. Mrs. Ramsey is both trapped in and pleased in her roles as wife, mother and hostess. The introspective Mr. Ramsey is consumed with his legacy of long-since-published abstract philosophy. This is a book that cannot be read—or heard—too often.
Publishers Weekly