The Beaded Curtain

Part autobiography, part memoir, part quest, lauded writer Lloyd Jones' s The Beaded Curtain is a trenchant exploration of the artist as witness. The text gets about from Jones' s Lower Hutt childhood and youthful wanderings across the USA to formative experiences such as seeing clothes from Hiroshima and his encounters with the Jewish Memorial in Berlin. From the hills of the Wairarapa to Hiroshima and Waiheke Island, he looks at examples of mavericks, in his own family and in those of poets and conscientious objectors. He is, throughout, daringly innovative, the text folding one event inside another. With language so precise and at times so coruscating that it may have been cut from stone, and with a candour and humanity that draws the reader deep into Jones' s preoccupations and memories, The Beaded Curtain challenges, rails and mourns as he grapples with the past. Elegant and searing, tender and angry, it holds the reader in its steady, accomplished, clear-eyed grip.