Book of the Week: Lloyd Jones wishes to tell us things we already know

Book of the Week: Lloyd Jones wishes to tell us things we already know

Lloyd Jones’ new memoir The Beaded Curtain is a journal of suffering and loneliness, rendered poetically. The mood is melancholic, disconnected, death-haunted. It opens with a killing and there are many, many more killings to come, reaching apocalyptic numbers, but the first killing is the killing of a huia, which is almost framed as an original sin of New Zealand life. Once we started killing the birds, what hope was there for our souls?  We he…