Review | On Lighthouses and The Last Story of Mina Lee – one takes on isolation, the other the immigrant experience
Mexico City-born writer Jazmina Barrera explores lighthouses around the world and in literature, while Nancy Jooyoun Kim’s debut novel takes the reader through grief, racism, the Korean war, family separation and more
On Lighthouses by Jazmina Barrera (translated from Spanish by Christina MacSweeney), Two Lines Press
Lighthouses are always anchored – to a shoreline, in our minds – but it’s hard to pin down this book on the subject. Jazmina Barrera organises On Lighthouses around half a dozen towers, in the United States, Spain, France and elsewhere, but the chapters are discursive, one minute illuminating their history, the next the author’s lighthouse “collection”, which includes lighthouses in literature, from Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927) to Menchu Gutiérrez’s Basenji (1994), about a lighthouse keeper and his dog.
It also includes lighthouses the author will never see, because they are extinct: the 3rd century BC “Pharos” of Alexandria, whose flame was visible more than 50km away, collapsed after a 1323 earthquake. Barrera is aware hers is not an original hobby, but she says researching lighthouses was like falling in love. She draws their interior plans to understand their staircases, their lights, their “guts”.
And she has favourites. “I prefer lighthouses with proper names,” she writes, explaining these are rare because they are usually connected to their locations. One that will capture your heart is children’s writer Hildegarde Swift’s “little red lighthouse”, on the Hudson River, saved after its 1948 decommissioning by readers who couldn’t bear to lose a part of their childhood. “People refused to allow life to be so prosaic.”
