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.
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‘A beaded curtain shifts and clatters in the doorway of Lloyd Jones’ mind, filtering early life, explorations, hauntings, and the terrible violences — domestic and global — that we too quickly turn from. This compelling narrative testifies to a writer’s vital work: paying attention and asking we do the same.’ — Kate De Goldi
'The Beaded Curtain is an experience worth making one’s own. ... It is a book that can be read either cover to cover, or kept at hand to dip into now and again. Inevitably, the reader will find passages to read more than once. This is a work with a long gestation, demonstrated by its breadth and depth, and one that will find readers around the world.' — Stephanie Johnson, Aotearoa New Zealand Review of Books
