What do you think?
Rate this book
The Lights of Earth
San Francisco is the setting for Gina Berriault's fourth novel tracing the life of Ilona Lewis, a fiction writer who is abandoned by her lover, Martin Vandersen, at the moment he gains great fame as a novelist. Hoping to heal from this abandonment, she is stirred by the need to remember a man she left behind years her older brother Albert, a difficult and troubled soul. Ilona realizes that her shame over him, which has lingered for years, has blighted her compassion and damaged her sense of wholeness. But while she struggles with these fateful memories, she experiences in her life what she had previously experienced only in her writing - the mingling of souls - and she begins to understand who the lights of earth really are.
- GenresFiction
164 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1984
About the author
Gina Berriault
30 books46 followersBerriault was born in Long Beach, California, to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents. Her father was a freelance writer and Berriault took her inspiration from him, using his stand-up typewriter to write her first stories while still in grammar school.
Berriault had a prolific writing career, which included stories, novels and screenplays. Her writing tended to focus on life in and around San Francisco. She published four novels and three collections of short stories, including Women in Their Beds: New & Selected Stories (1996), which won the PEN/Faulkner Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award. In 1997 Berriault was chosen as winner of the Rea Award for the Short Story, for outstanding achievement in that genre.
Berriault taught writing at the Iowa Writers Workshop and San Francisco State University. She also received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Ingram-Merrill Fellowship, a Commonwealth Gold Medal for Literature, the Pushcart Prize and several O'Henry prizes.
She adapted her short story "The Stone Boy" for a film of the same title, released in 1984.[2] The same story had previously been adapted by another writer for a 1960 television presentation.[
Berriault had a prolific writing career, which included stories, novels and screenplays. Her writing tended to focus on life in and around San Francisco. She published four novels and three collections of short stories, including Women in Their Beds: New & Selected Stories (1996), which won the PEN/Faulkner Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award. In 1997 Berriault was chosen as winner of the Rea Award for the Short Story, for outstanding achievement in that genre.
Berriault taught writing at the Iowa Writers Workshop and San Francisco State University. She also received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Ingram-Merrill Fellowship, a Commonwealth Gold Medal for Literature, the Pushcart Prize and several O'Henry prizes.
She adapted her short story "The Stone Boy" for a film of the same title, released in 1984.[2] The same story had previously been adapted by another writer for a 1960 television presentation.[
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
March 12, 2020
It's funny how people touch our lives often so fleetingly, from a distance, in a stray moments, random acts of kindness, even from beyond the grave. I was in Gina Berriault's short story writing workshop at San Francisco State maybe two years before she published this, the last of her four novels. She may well have been writing it between classes, wishing, probably, that she didn't have so many students and had more time to ply her art. I, too, now balance my writing with my academic duties, write between classes, and reflect, as this novel does so well, on how we reveal ourselves to others or don't, how we're caught often between the desire for solitude and the desire to bare ourselves to other human beings--often in guarded ways: though love, or writing.
While this starts out as a kind of "somebody done somebody wrong song," it gradually becomes much more than that and is perhaps Berriault's greatest legacy. The novel intertwines two tales, a woman's relationship with a lover and her brother, and thereby exposes a wounded consciousness both subtly and in an unexpectedly raw way. Such balance is rarely achieved in writing.
Berriault is quite unique as a writer, hard to categorize, very much the solitary figure that she paints so well in The Lights of Earth. I remember a fellow SF State creative writing alumn remarking in the years following our studies that Gina "was incredibly shy, always ducking into the bathroom to hide if she saw one of her students coming down the hallway."
I, too, am always struggling to both reveal and hide myself in my work and reading this I felt Berriault's presence both strongly and as if veiled. I felt a kindred spirit and wished we hadn't been teacher and student, more than twenty years apart in age, and that I could have wandered the streets of San Francisco that Ilona walks here speaking of love and literature, self revelation and self erasure through words with her. At least, having had her as a teacher, I've had the privilege of returning to her written work and revisiting it nearly 40 years on and enjoying it. It's all that fate allowed.
PS: The style here perhaps shows why Berriault was primarily a short story writer. This novel never slips into the kind of easy pace of most novels. It's rather like an extended short story, every scene, every sentence, telling and necessary. It's lovely in its own way: uncategorizable, ineffable, without either literary movement or historical period to explain it. It just is what it is, seemingly outside of time.
While this starts out as a kind of "somebody done somebody wrong song," it gradually becomes much more than that and is perhaps Berriault's greatest legacy. The novel intertwines two tales, a woman's relationship with a lover and her brother, and thereby exposes a wounded consciousness both subtly and in an unexpectedly raw way. Such balance is rarely achieved in writing.
Berriault is quite unique as a writer, hard to categorize, very much the solitary figure that she paints so well in The Lights of Earth. I remember a fellow SF State creative writing alumn remarking in the years following our studies that Gina "was incredibly shy, always ducking into the bathroom to hide if she saw one of her students coming down the hallway."
I, too, am always struggling to both reveal and hide myself in my work and reading this I felt Berriault's presence both strongly and as if veiled. I felt a kindred spirit and wished we hadn't been teacher and student, more than twenty years apart in age, and that I could have wandered the streets of San Francisco that Ilona walks here speaking of love and literature, self revelation and self erasure through words with her. At least, having had her as a teacher, I've had the privilege of returning to her written work and revisiting it nearly 40 years on and enjoying it. It's all that fate allowed.
PS: The style here perhaps shows why Berriault was primarily a short story writer. This novel never slips into the kind of easy pace of most novels. It's rather like an extended short story, every scene, every sentence, telling and necessary. It's lovely in its own way: uncategorizable, ineffable, without either literary movement or historical period to explain it. It just is what it is, seemingly outside of time.
July 15, 2023
I gave it 4 stars because I am not a good poetic reader and this one had me so confused on how to read it. Felt like my mind was all over the place.
December 1, 2018
Some writers draw us on with plot, others with character, and some find subtler means. Berriault uses tone.
April 30, 2025
“Never had she begged for anything from anybody. Unless, without knowing it, she had begged the very air, all her life.”
I wasn't quite as impressed with this one as I was with Conference of Victims, though there is still much to admire here. Berriault's sentences are so pristine; they are careful but never cowardly.
I wasn't quite as impressed with this one as I was with Conference of Victims, though there is still much to admire here. Berriault's sentences are so pristine; they are careful but never cowardly.
January 4, 2022
This was beautifully written, but heavy and depressing...
September 9, 2023
Though this story and voice are melancholy, about loss, about failure and betrayal and prescience of same, I did not mind in the least. Why not? Because to me, finding what happens in a novel pleasurable or edifying or whatever positive experience I can think of, that pales in contrast to finding myself inside a story this rich in feeling, and real in imagery. Berriault is a magician in that respect. Her voice, tone, events and descriptions are of a piece and cast a compelling spell over me.
September 3, 2021
"Le luci della terra sono forse tutti gli esseri che ti tirano fuori dall'oscurità, tutte le persone che fanno parte della tua vita?"
Quale coacervo di sentimenti, sentori, emozioni, elaborazioni ed elucubrazioni portano con sé ”la paura della perdita e la perdita”? Che sia la consapevolezza della fine di una relazione, l’essere lasciati o l’abbandonare o l’inaridimento dell’estro creativo, i meccanismi delle nostre risposte possono mettere in moto i sentimenti più contrastanti: il senso di inadeguatezza e di solitudine "dell’intrusa che immaginava più di quel che vedeva e vedeva più di quanto avrebbe dovuto, della persona che non poteva guardarli negli occhi perché, se lo avesse fatto, loro avrebbero guardato nei suoi", i sensi di colpa, l’invidia per chi resta o ce la fa, anche se talvolta solo momentaneamente, il terrore che l’oblio cancelli la memoria di noi. È il malessere psicologico che si accompagna a quello fisico e che può paralizzarci nella memoria del passato e nell’anticipazione conseguente di quella futura, che può portare anche alla cancellazione fisica di noi se non c’è nulla al di fuori che ci faccia sentire utili e unici, anche solo una voce "'Ilona!' Ilona. Il suo nome le giunse al di sopra del frastuono come una pietra lanciata su un lago placido, e quella voce esprimeva il bisogno profondo della sua presenza sulla terra. Contro le onde che la tiravano indietro, trovò un punto d’appoggio e si fece strada verso la figurina che correva sulla spiaggia."
Gina Berriault ci guida in questo groviglio dosando sapientemente le parole e le immagini, visto che è anche un omaggio alla scrittura e agli scrittori con i loro vizi e le loro virtù, senza eccedere, senza sentimentalismi, a partire dalla pertinente citazione ad esergo, "Terribile passione, quella di volere che la nostra memoria sopravviva all’oblio, se possibile", che racconta già molto.
Bellissimo, forse è il miglior libro dell'autrice che ho letto tra quelli finora tradotti.
Quale coacervo di sentimenti, sentori, emozioni, elaborazioni ed elucubrazioni portano con sé ”la paura della perdita e la perdita”? Che sia la consapevolezza della fine di una relazione, l’essere lasciati o l’abbandonare o l’inaridimento dell’estro creativo, i meccanismi delle nostre risposte possono mettere in moto i sentimenti più contrastanti: il senso di inadeguatezza e di solitudine "dell’intrusa che immaginava più di quel che vedeva e vedeva più di quanto avrebbe dovuto, della persona che non poteva guardarli negli occhi perché, se lo avesse fatto, loro avrebbero guardato nei suoi", i sensi di colpa, l’invidia per chi resta o ce la fa, anche se talvolta solo momentaneamente, il terrore che l’oblio cancelli la memoria di noi. È il malessere psicologico che si accompagna a quello fisico e che può paralizzarci nella memoria del passato e nell’anticipazione conseguente di quella futura, che può portare anche alla cancellazione fisica di noi se non c’è nulla al di fuori che ci faccia sentire utili e unici, anche solo una voce "'Ilona!' Ilona. Il suo nome le giunse al di sopra del frastuono come una pietra lanciata su un lago placido, e quella voce esprimeva il bisogno profondo della sua presenza sulla terra. Contro le onde che la tiravano indietro, trovò un punto d’appoggio e si fece strada verso la figurina che correva sulla spiaggia."
Gina Berriault ci guida in questo groviglio dosando sapientemente le parole e le immagini, visto che è anche un omaggio alla scrittura e agli scrittori con i loro vizi e le loro virtù, senza eccedere, senza sentimentalismi, a partire dalla pertinente citazione ad esergo, "Terribile passione, quella di volere che la nostra memoria sopravviva all’oblio, se possibile", che racconta già molto.
Bellissimo, forse è il miglior libro dell'autrice che ho letto tra quelli finora tradotti.
August 31, 2007
The one thing I liked about this book: It was set in the San Francisco Bay Area.
I pretty much disliked everything else. The main character is annoying and shallow -- no emotional connection to her whatsoever. Her friends are also annoying and shallow. I felt like I was reading about a bunch of completely self-absorbed people in a literary ivory tower -- they were all selfish, two-dimensional.
I know the book is written with very sparse language -- writing style is like it's trying to have a very light touch. But man, there's just no meat here at all.
And the ending -- don't even get me started.
Skip this book.
I pretty much disliked everything else. The main character is annoying and shallow -- no emotional connection to her whatsoever. Her friends are also annoying and shallow. I felt like I was reading about a bunch of completely self-absorbed people in a literary ivory tower -- they were all selfish, two-dimensional.
I know the book is written with very sparse language -- writing style is like it's trying to have a very light touch. But man, there's just no meat here at all.
And the ending -- don't even get me started.
Skip this book.
June 15, 2007
Cathy said: "dry, cerebral, slight."
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews