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Maybe someday
35
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
33/100Critics
37/100Scholars
Author:
Jazmina Barrera, Christina MacSweeney
Publisher:
Two Lines Press
Date:
May 12, 2020
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.
What The Reviewers Say
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.
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.
... six poignant personal essays.
