On Lighthouses
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
“This book is a light at the end of the tunnel.” —The Paris Review
Far from home, in the confines of a dim New York apartment where the oppressive skyscrapers further isolate her, Jazmina Barrera offers a tour of her lighthouses—those structures whose message is “first and foremost, that human beings are here.”
Starting with Robert Louis Stevenson’s grandfather, an engineer charged with illuminating the Scottish coastline, On Lighthouses artfully examines lighthouses from the Spanish to the Oregon coasts and those in the works of Virginia Woolf, Edgar Allan Poe, Ingmar Bergman, and many others.
In trying to “collect” lighthouses by obsessively describing them, Barrera begins to question the nature of writing, collecting, and how, by staring so intently at one thing we are only trying to avoid others. Equal parts personal memoir and literary history, On Lighthouses takes the reader on a desperate flight from raging sea to cold stone—from a hopeless isolation to a meaningful one—concluding at last in a place of peace: the home of a selfless, guiding light.
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This meandering book of essays from Barrera (Foreign Body), cofounder of Mexican publishing house Ediciones Ant lope, centers on the act of collecting and the history of lighthouses. As a girl, Barrera recalls, she mostly collected marbles and gemstones, but she's since moved on to collecting the "history of lighthouses the stories surrounding them." Each essay is organized around a specific lighthouse she's visited, gathering together anecdotes about her visit, histories of that lighthouse and its keepers, and literary references. For her visit to the lighthouse in Montauk, Long Island, N.Y., she notes that George Washington envisioned its construction upon visiting the same spot in 1756, quotes a poem Walt Whitman wrote about the lighthouse, and finishes with an inventory of the different rituals that have surrounded the activation of lighthouse beacons. This free-associative style makes for pleasant reading, but doesn't often lead the essays to satisfying conclusions. Barrera writes that "there are collections that will always be incomplete," an observation that seems all too apt for this intriguing but aimless work.
