Equal parts personal memoir and literary history, Mexican writer Jazmina Barrera's 'collection' of lighthouses explores the allure of loneliness and asks how we use it to create meaning.
Dodging linearity, subverting convention, eluding particularity, it awes. With these micro-histories of six lighthouses—silent pillars of the coast—Barrera conjures a melancholic ode to the unreachable, quintessential beauty of solitude. You can’t look away. On Lighthouses hypnotizes in all the ways a book ought to, calling to mind the very nature of books ... Like any lighthouse, grounded and yet always at sea, On Lighthouses delights in paradox—the pull between duty and desire, ennui and mania, contentment and fear. The bibliography runs pages long, a cluttered bricolage of research. Barrera’s 'study' of lighthouses is frenetic while her descriptions of them ring immaculately laconic. She is, in other words, definitively undefinitive ... Barrera has given every lonely soul and reader a lighthouse all her own—a fixed point, in days of solitude—a mental anchor to the earth as we drift aimlessly at sea.
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.
A slim, idiosyncratic history of these structures and their appearances in literature—from Robert Louis Stevenson, whose father and grandfather engineered them, to Virginia Woolf, to Ray Bradbury—the book allows the reader flashes of Barrera’s emotional life amid the accumulated detail ... universality is key to the charm of Barrera’s subject. She’s aware of the lurking dangers of sentimentality, and of how unoriginal her lighthouse obsession is. It’s oddly cheering to know, while you fantasize about escaping everybody else, that most all of them are thinking the very same thing.
