Lauded writer Lloyd Jones’s The Beaded Curtain is a trenchant exploration of the artist as witness. What is it to be a witness? How does one go about it? And who is this Jones, the witness? A strong autobiographical strand runs through a text that gets about from Jones’s Lower Hutt childhood and youthful wanderings across the USA to formative experiences such as seeing an exhibition of clothes from Hiroshima and his many encounters with the Jewish Memorial in Berlin. Along the way 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.
