On Lighthouses

by Jazmina Barrera, Christina MacSweeney (Translator)

Overview

“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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781949641011
Publisher:	Two Lines Press
Publication date:	05/12/2020
Pages:	174
Sales rank:	700,711
Product dimensions:	4.60(w) x 7.10(h) x 0.70(d)
Age Range:	16 Years

About the Author

Jazmina Barrera was born in Mexico City in 1988. She was a fellow at the Foundation for Mexican Letters. Her book of essays Cuerpo extraño (Foreign Body) was awarded the Latin American Voices prize from Literal Publishing in 2013. She has published her work in various print and digital media, such as Nexos, Este País, Dossier, Vice, and more. She is editor and co-founder of Ediciones Antílope. She lives in Mexico City.

Christina MacSweeney received the 2016 Valle Inclan prize for her translation of Valeria Luiselli's The Story of My Teeth, and Among Strange Victims (Daniel Saldaña París) was a finalist in the 2017 Best Translated Book Award. Among the other authors she has translated are: Elvira Navarro (A Working Woman), Verónica Gerber Bicecci (Empty Set; Palabras migrantes/Migrant Words), and Julián Herbert (Tomb Song; The House of the Pain of Others). She is currently working on a second novel by Daniel Saldaña París and her translations of short story collection by Elvira Navarro and Julián Herbert will be published in 2020.

Read an Excerpt

There are experiences that are lived in a historical present for as long as their memory is evoked, with the full knowledge that the memory will be revisited in the future. It was a twenty-minute drive to the Yaquina Head Light, followed by a ten-minute walk from the parking lot. Formerly known as the Cape Foulweather Lighthouse, it is a twenty-eight-meter white tower with a black tip.

The lighthouse comes slowly into view between hills covered by a patchwork of, yellow and white flowers, and those grasses that move in the wind, which Virginia Woolf might say always on the point of fleeing “into some moon country, uninhabited of men.” It grows, closes in, and shows first its tip, then the lens with its copper belly, followed by the observation platform, the tower, and the door to the house beneath. Woolf describes her lighthouse as “distant, austere.” And she goes on to write, “So much depends…upon distance,” From afar, a lighthouse is a ghost, or rather a myth, a symbol. At close quarters it is a beautiful building. Once you’re inside, it ceases to be that, because a lighthouse is direction and never a point of arrival. Even when I was inside, I continued moving, up the iron spiral staircase leading to the tip, where the Fresnel lens, whose light is visible at a distance of thirty-one kilometers, was located.

The Pharos, the faro, the phare, the farol, the far: the house that is not only home to and protector of the light, but also transforms it into language. Its light speaks. Gives warning of points of danger, sandbanks, reefs; it signals a nearby port; tells how far away it is and identifies itself by its blink pattern. The Yaquina Head Light flashes two seconds on, two seconds off, two seconds on, fourteen seconds off. The lighthouse that Mrs. Ramsay sees in Woolf’s novel has two short flashes followed by a single long one.

We spent only a few minutes inside the lighthouse. Once back in the open air, we were stopped by a sign saying, “Look for Whales!” And scarcely a minute had gone by before we saw two (or were there three or four?) humpbacks. Gray on gray: the whales, the waves. I’ve read that no one knows for certain why they leap from the water, and I’d like that to always remain the case.

We then went down to a small beach replete with perfectly smooth black pebbles and strings of green seaweed. There are two photographs of me sitting on a large rock on that beach. My face isn’t visible; I’m looking out toward a horizon outside the frame of the photo. I wonder, now, what was there. Clouds? Ships? I seem to recall some black birds hopping nearby on the rocks.

What I definitely remember is turning to look at the lighthouse and having the sensation that it was very distant. As if it had never been there. Because even when you reach the observation deck look out over the vast ocean to the horizon, there by the light source itself, one never reaches the lighthouse. And neither did James, who was disillusioned to find that the one he finally visited didn’t match his childhood imagining. Experience sometimes falls short of memory, and sometimes it’s memory that can’t achieve the heights of experience. The memory of this trip, my words telling what I recall, will fall short of what it was. The preposition in the title to Woolf’s novel contains the whole of story, always approaching the lighthouse, which is above all an ideal, memory, promise: the inaccessible. What moves us.

Editorial Reviews

02/10/2020

This meandering book of essays from Barrera (Foreign Body), cofounder of Mexican publishing house Ediciones Antílope, 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. (May)

Publishers Weekly

2020-01-16
A writer muses on what lighthouses mean to her.

Barrera, a Mexican journalist and editor and co-founder of the Mexico City–based publisher Ediciones Antilope, confesses early on that she’s a collector. “Collecting is a form of escapism,” she writes. After visiting Yaquina Head Lighthouse on the Oregon coast, she wanted “to articulate my feelings about that panorama—the moment and the lighthouse.” There was “something in the lighthouse itself that intrigued me.” Following that trip, she visited a few others and conducted research into their histories and the stories surrounding them: “It was like falling in love; I wanted to know the lighthouse to its very core.” Each story includes a wide array of topics in lighthouse culture, including literature, history, science, art, music, and the daily, brutal lives of the isolated keepers and their families. “From afar, a lighthouse is a ghost, or rather a myth, a symbol,” writes the author. “At close quarters, it is a beautiful building.” Barrera gives close attention to Robert Louis Stevenson’s family: his father, Thomas, instrumental in developing the revolutionary lens that replaced kerosene lamps, and his grandfather, Robert, the first to “construct a lighthouse on a marine rock, far from the coast.” The author is also intrigued that Edgar Allan Poe’s last, unfinished story was about a lighthouse keeper. Barrera chronicles her visit to the Ghoury Lighthouse, built in 1823 after a boat shipwrecked off the Normandy coast, and she comments on the many lighthouses in Edward Hopper’s paintings; he “said that the lighthouse is a solitary individual who stoically confronts the onrush of industrial society.” The author bemoans the fact that GPS and computers may one day make them obsolete. After reading Yukio Mishima’s The Decay of the Angel, about an orphaned boy who works in a signal station, Barrera stopped writing. “There are collections that will always be incomplete, and sometimes it’s better not to continue them.”

These subtle, reflective observations offer delightful insights into the lighthouse mystique.

Kirkus Reviews

Lighthouses, the ‘frontier between civilization and nature,’ are places of solitude. But they are also signals of shore and home. This book is a light at the end of the tunnel, showing us places we’ll see and things we’ll do when we can go out again.”—The Paris Review

“Precise and erudite, Barrera’s writing is as alluring and arresting as the landscapes and stories it conveys. Each piece is crafted with care, imbued with Barrera’s poignant critical sense and her perspicacious ability to unravel the different levels of affect, historicity, and magnificence that constitute the everyday life of each lighthouse.” —Los Angeles Review of Books

“[On Lighthouses] appears on the surface to be six poignant personal essays littered with intriguing references to lighthouses, their keepers and their myriad influences on literature and art throughout history, [but] what comes through is a dark and often obsessive meditation on what it feels like to squirrel yourself away from the world and embrace isolation in the name of pursuing a passion…something beyond just a good-natured study of shipwrecks and their saviors.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“Barrera's obsession is contagious. Her graceful sentences ensnare tidbits of history and tantalizing glimpses of her own life, accompanied by delicate sketches of lighthouses she's visited, making this book a refuge from everyday life, a place of enchantment and safety.” —Shelf Awareness (starred review)

“On Lighthouses hypnotizes in all the ways a book ought to, calling to mind the very nature of books. Meek and pale, washed ashore of life’s rapid tides, the reader and her book are already strange figures in our world, lonely spirts drifting for hours alone, outside of time and place. In this sense—in Barrera’s sense—a book is a lighthouse and its reader the sunken-eyed keeper haunting its hollow passages, lighting its searchlight night after night. And we’ve only just stuck our toe in.” —AirMail Weekly

“[Jazmina Barrera’s On Lighthouses] examines literature, history, science, art, music, and the daily, brutal lives of the isolated keepers and their families. . . . These subtle, reflective observations offer delightful insights into the lighthouse mystique.” —Kirkus Reviews

“The attentive lyricism of [Barrera's] self-exploration pulls the reader steadily along the craggy coastlines of the world. Her language, reflected in MacSweeney’s crystal clear translation, is grounded and tranquil, at times contrasting with the turmoil of grief and isolation that Barrera feels throughout her travels.… [On Lighthouses] is a multifaceted collection, vibrant in its constant search for more iterative complexity, meant to be read slowly and considerately.” —Entropy

“Barrera’s tight focus provides the binding that holds her book together. The writing itself is characterized by clipped passages and abrupt transitions – not unlike the staccato flashes of light, the unique blink patterns emitted by individual lighthouses.…The emotional weight is conveyed in the author’s omissions, the negative spaces created by what is withheld.” —Tara Cheesman, On the Seawall

“Through its fascination with lighthouses: their mythologies, histories, operational minutia, iconic personages (all those anonymous lighthouse keepers of every coast); and also with concise poetic prose about Barrera’s lighthouse-obsessed wanderings, this book will literally enchant you. To read Jazmina Barrera’s extraordinary book is to find a little lighthouse inside yourself, one that will go on emitting a roaming, yearning, beckoning, consoling loveliness.”—Francisco Goldman, author of Say Her Name

"Like a bowerbird constructing its nest, Jazmina Barrera collects microhistories about the hypnotic, geometric light emitted by lighthouses; but when she finds and listens to these histories in the dark intervals, she is a bat hanging upside down in the tower of memory." —Verónica Gerber Bicecci, author of Empty Set

“This is a glorious, beckoning story, catching enlightening glimpses of literature and vivid experience in its flashing beams; beautifully written, it is as evocative and as alluring as a lighthouse glimpsed on a distant headland from a dark and mysterious sea.” —Philip Hoare, author of RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR

“Jazmina Barrera has woven a narrative that is both poetic and informative, full of bizarre and particular details as well as suggestions that reverberate throughout, much like musical motifs. The lighthouses contained in this notebook are real lighthouses that still light up at night on coasts throughout the world as well as lighthouses that faded centuries ago, and a few lighthouses that never existed, mythological lighthouses and engineers’ projects, lighthouses that are undoubtedly gifted with a symbolism that passed through the history of literature and that seem to be located in a very deep part of our psychological vocabulary, of the catalogue of images that exist just as vividly both in reality and in dreams.”—Antonio Muñoz Molina, author of Sepharad

"If my intuition is right, and we are in fact witnessing the emergence of a new encyclopedic passion in Latin American literature, this book will be a benchmark in the future of this movement.”—Patricio Pron, author of My Father's Ghost is Climbing in the Rain

From the Publisher