A History of Silence: a memoir

by Lloyd Jones

As the New Zealand city of Christchurch lies in ruins after the catastrophic earthquake of February 2011, Lloyd Jones begins a search for his past, a search that takes him through childhood memories of puzzling events to Pembroke Dock in Wales, and finally to the discovery of a devastating court transcript.

On this extraordinary journey, he pieces together the fragments of a story that has been buried in his family for a lifetime. A mother who gave up her daughter, a naval captain drowned at sea, a marriage to save a child. And a truth that changes everything.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction, History, Book Club, Biography Memoir, Family, Biography

273 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 2013

About the author

Lloyd Jones was born in 1955 in Lower Hutt, New Zealand, a place which has become a frequent setting and subject for his subsequent works of fiction. He studied at Victoria University, and has worked as a journalist and consultant as well as a writer. His recent novels are: Biografi (1993); Choo Woo (1998); Here At The End of the World We Learn to Dance (2002); Paint Your Wife (2004);and Mister Pip (2007). He is also the author of a collection of short stories, Swimming to Australia (1991).

In 2003, he published a children's picture book, Napoleon and the Chicken Farmer, and this was followed by Everything You Need to Know About the World by Simon Eliot (2004), a book for 9-14 year olds. He compiled Into the Field of Play: New Zealand Writers on the Theme of Sport (1992), and also wrote Last Saturday (1994), the book of an exhibition about New Zealand Saturdays, with photographs by Bruce Foster. The Book of Fame (2000), is his semi-fictional account of the 1905 All-Black tour, and was adapted for the stage by Carol Nixon in 2003.

Lloyd Jones won the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Overall Winner, Best Book) and the Kiriyama Prize for his novel, Mister Pip (2007), set in Bougainville in the South Pacific, during the 1990s. He was also shortlisted for the 2007 Man Booker Prize for Fiction. In the same year he undertook a Creative New Zealand Berlin Writers' Residency.

Reviews

[Marianne · Rating 3 out of 5]

“There might have been more to tell if more had been shared, if questions had been asked, if information had been offered and passed along at the moment it lit up in memory. But the family trait was silence. Great wreaths of it were wound around our lives and stuffed in the windows and hallway of our parents’ house, and that is what was absorbed, that and, speaking for myself, a finely tuned ability to gauge the air in the room which at any moment might explode with the slam of a door”

A History of Silence is a memoir by New Zealand author, Lloyd Jones. Asked by a BBC radio producer to comment on the Christchurch earthquake of February, 2011, Jones travels there from his home in an old Auckland shoe factory to observe, perhaps to help? What he sees sets off a need inside him to discover the true history of his family, of which little has ever been revealed.

Jones turns his wonderful talent for descriptive prose to this memoir of his forebears: “I have never felt as lightly tethered to the earth as when the nor-wester is at full bombastic strength. Even my face feels rearranged – I can feel the nose bone sticking up and the wrong patch of skin where the forehead normally sits. Eyelids have to be prised open. The nose drips”

His research takes him to Pembroke Dock in search of a paternal grandfather allegedly “lost at sea”, but his narrative also tends to go off on loosely-related tangents, like relating a visit to Russia to meet his wife’s ancestors. In his search, he regularly draws parallels with both the earthquake and, later, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. Thus it takes a while to reach the most interesting part: the court transcript of his maternal grandmother’s divorce.

“Of course the earthquake struck when and where it did, and to the naked eye of course the pattern of bad luck would seem random, unless of course you knew about the old city map indicating ancient subterranean waterways, and of course I would find myself born into a world of silence because that is precisely what the shamed bestows upon the progeny – a wilful forgetting”

[Carina · Rating 3 out of 5]

Gentle wafflings form a good portion of this book. They're not unpleasant - but mostly, they're not as interesting as they need to be if they are to be a book, rather than a lovely chat over a cuppa.
Around part 5 of 6, things got spicy and intriguing - for a while. I realise some background setting needed to be established prior, but it was hard hanging on for so long. The earthquake themes (both actual and comparative) were apt, but pushed a tad hard.
It took me a while to read through this book - again, not because it was unpleasant (Lloyd Jones writes with elegance and honesty) but just because my other books always seemed to beckon louder and incite my interest a little more.

[Lyn Elliott · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jones writes prose like a poet. His imagery is stunning from first to last.
The opening lines are: 'Night-time. The city is strung out like sea bloom. No lapping sounds. Just a volume of events that rocks inside me.'
Immediately you know you are in for a skin-prickling journey. Jones keeps his grip firm throughout, whether he is writing about the city and suburbs of Christcurch, built on drained swamp that shook and swirled into collapse in the great earthquake of February 2011, or his reluctant lifting of layers of concealment in his family history.
As he gradually unwraps his mother's story in something approaching a conventional narrative, the images of rottenness (the smells underlying lifted concrete), amnesia, silence and loss fall into place. This is a memorable book and I am likely to reread it, not for the narrative line but for Jones' wonderful way with words.
A major discovery.

[Kiwiflora · Rating 5 out of 5]

http://www.themonthly.com.au/book-clu...

I had the most peculiar reaction to reading this memoir by the very highly regarded Lloyd Jones. For the first five years of my life I lived 1.7kms in one direction from where the author was living out his childhood, and for the next 15 years I lived 1.7kms in the other direction. Our paths never crossed, (he is a few years older), but everything he writes about the place of Lower Hutt, and the sense of place is very strong in this book, had a startling ring of truth about it. From Stellin Street where I learnt to drive, to his days at the intermediate school, to the shop in the High St his school uniform was bought at, to his descriptions of Petone, the Hutt River bed, Eastbourne and the bays - I could see it all so clearly and in his retelling of his memory, he made me remember too. Just as wonderful was the quite amazing thought that just up the road a writer of such genius was slowly incubating!

Every family has its secrets, its stories that change over the years to accommodate new narrators and mores of the time, its black sheep, and often full truths never come out because they are too painful, considered too shameful, or quite simply just too hard to deal with. Lloyd Jones' parents, Joyce and Lew, were both extensively scarred by the circumstances of their childhoods, carrying their burdens into their marriage and the parenting of their five children, of whom Lloyd was the youngest by some ten years.

Lloyd grows up in a household of silence, where he and his siblings know very little about their parents' early lives. All they really know is that there was a fair bit of sadness. There is a complete lack of family stories, no photos on the walls, what he calls 'wilful forgetting'. Because he has nothing to compare this with, he grows up thinking nothing much about this lack, and is puzzled only momentarily when he goes driving, from time to time, with his mother to a house that they sit outside of for a while and then drive away again. His siblings are adults long before he is, and so he lives alone in the house with his parents, about whom he knows very little. One Christmas his older sister produces the results of her own research into their parents, a myriad mix of birth, death and marriage certificates which doesn't really answer any questions and leads to a whole lot more.

The devastating Christchurch earthquake of February 2011, was the catalyst Lloyd Jones needed to kick start his search for where he came from and what made him. Throughout the book, Jones uses Christchurch repairing itself and rebuilding its foundations as an analogy for him finding his own base and putting the pieces of his family puzzle into place. The narrative takes the reader from Christchurch to Lower Hutt, as far away as Wales, Wairarapa, the backblocks of North Canterbury, Wellington, backwards and forwards, to and fro, weaving and threading the story of a family through these places.

It is very moving to read such a personal account of a family's story, or more to the point the stories of Joyce and Lew. This memoir reads more as a tribute to the parents, and Lloyd himself finally seems to find out from whom he has inherited aspects of his own self and the influences that have shaped him. This is writing written with love and longing, and all the more poignant for that. The story teller in the author comes shining through as he expands on the lives of the people he is writing about, as they react to the events taking place around them. There are some threads I just could not figure out the relevance of - the boxing bout between Bob Fitzsimmons and Gentleman Jim Corbett springs to mind. But boxing was a big thing in the house he grew up in. Maybe I was just too tired to fully comprehend the significance. Never mind, such a tiny criticism, it barely matters.

This is a book I will treasure, not just because of the eloquent writing, but because he has given honour and integrity to the lives of two people who were unable to really find it for themselves during their own lifetimes. Read or watch the interview in the link below - well worth the time taken.
http://www.themonthly.com.au/book-clu...

[Angie Reisetter · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is in the rarified genre of reluctant memoirs. As a man who grew up without grandparents, thinking that was something for other people, Jones needed a violent, literally earth-shaking reason to start looking into his family's past. I love the way Jones sees metaphors in everything around him, constantly writing the world. He sees a woman gardening against the backdrop of a destroyed city and asks whether we are solving the right problems as we go about our lives. He learns of the liquified foundations of a city built on a drained swamp (Christchurch), and wonders what the foundations of his identity are. So unless you're willing to wander in the world of metaphor with him, some of this may not make sense to you. But I loved it.

His parents were both abandoned children, termed "orphans" although their parents were not technically all dead. So the identities of his grandparents and their personalities are more mysterious to him than they are to most people. He traces back to their lives, trying to find their cores. The title is both literal and metaphorical -- he describes his father as someone who hardly ever speaks, and his history is silent because of its mystery.

Anyway, this is a very different sort of memoir than even most authors write (and most who write memoirs have not lived their lives as writers). He has been resisting questions about his past for a long time, so he's not sure where this investigation will go or whether he wants to know what he will find. It's full of metaphor, of questioning, and of vulnerability, and therefore a bit of discomfort. I found it a very interesting read.

[Lindz · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was part of my I don't read enough New Zealand books, so I am reading more New Zealand books, kick. There are a few stretched metaphors in this memoir. I am still not sure how the 2011 Christchurch earthquake has to do with Lloyd Jones family Wellington family history, other than earthquake sympathy and a gorgeously imaged if thinly spread metaphor of weak foundations.

But I do have admit, on the 22 February 2011 there were many kiwi expats who asked a delicate question, there's been an earthquake in Christchurch do you have any family there? Events like this do not happen in New Zealand, they just don't, New Zealand is beautiful calm and boring. The last major seismic event was in 1931, a whole generation ago. I loved how Jones described the incredible disbelief of watching New Zealand's third largest city brought to it's knees. From there Lloyd Jones goes onto search into his family and it's own shaky ground. I have a sneaky suspicion that the earthquake occurred as the author was starting to write this, so the the earthquake was still in Jone's consciousness and therefore in his prose.

The writing is fluid and beautiful. I loved the descriptions of the streets of Wellington, for six years they were also my streets, my home. But some times the book did feel a little too water colour, at times I felt like there was nothing to grab on too. But that could be more personal taste than anything else.

[Colin Higgins · Rating 3 out of 5]

I did quite like this book......as I got nearer the end. The first part seemed to be all over the place, and I didn't rally have something to grab on to. The weaving in of the Christchurch earthquake was a bit distracting. While I get the metaphor, I don't think it worked that well. The book was most interesting in dealing with his mother's story.

[Matthew Oliver · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mixed feelings about this book. Early life and family descriptions, especially of his parents' and grandparents' lives are great but not sure what the Christchurch connection is. Nor does it hang together; it's a collection of memories and vignettes more than anything.

[Bachyboy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautifully written in typical Lloyd Jones style. Some parts are so lovely you almost want to write them down. Not that this is a beautiful story though; it is a memoir tinged with angst and regret for the life that his mother didn't get, given away as a child. Worth reading.

[Melanie Lindstrom · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interesting family story, but I found I really had to concentrate to keep up with the prose and the leaps between the modern, past and Christchurch earthquake scenarios.

[Jenny Esots · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lloyd Jones is following his bloodline.
What gets left behind? What gets hidden?
In this review I refer to the author by his first name, Lloyd. As I somehow feel I have come to know him.
Why does Lloyd make this journey into his past history at this time in his life?
The other side of fifty, more questions about mortality, purpose, searching for answers that remained out of sight. Beginning to wonder, having your own children. Remembrances.
Lloyd delves into why we retain the things we do. In the process revealing himself to be an exceptionally gifted and reflective writer.
p.245.
‘ I looked into the hairdressers window once and saw her, wide eyed beneath a dryer, like someone receiving electric shock treatment. My father used to say I’d send my mother to (an early grave) to the loony bin if I carried on the way I did. I can’t remember what I did to cause offence. This recollection has no role to play. But, it continues to exist, like a card fallen out of a pack, representative of other such moments that fail to add up to anything more. In this way life sheds itself. It leaves skin on the furniture, hair on a pillow. A life reduces to a couple of walk on parts in other people’s recollections. And while some fade, others remain stuck forever like an overbearing portrait glowering down from the walls.’
This is one of the standout examples of Lloyd’s take on memory, those remembered moments that stick like glue. Whether we want them there or not.
The silence, the hidden pasts of families, Lloyd equates with stage fright, echoes of fear and shame.
There are many, many stories of hidden pasts. The dead end of a generation. Lost without any artefacts to trace.
Lloyd is able to trace his threads from the past. The artefacts, letters, transcripts, voices left to be heard. Overlayed with the trauma of loss of the scale of disaster that struck Christchurch in 2011.
Is this why the author feels the need to walk the streets and stand where his ancestors stood? Any ancestors. As he curiously goes to a place named Zula with a fabricated family history from his wife’s ancestry.
Finding the missing pieces of the past helps to discover why things happened the way they did, why people are the way they are. But one hundred years on there is a lot of the benefit of hindsight.
Dying
Lloyd recalls one of the last looks of hope and trust by his dying dog and mother. The sense of helplessness at having to let them go. The knowing what was to happen seen as a massive betrayal.
For each person dying it is like we haven’t done this before. Like we need to know the rules, but it appears we don’t. So people blunder on. Lloyd earlier relates the story of the doctor asking if his mother knows she is dying. The tip toeing around the central truth of dying.
Eventually Lloyd tells his mother ‘You’re on your last legs’. She relates that she has been let down. The conclusion being ‘Dying feels like we have let down our loved ones.’ As if there is more that could have been done, somehow for human or animal. It could also be her mother surmising that in life she had been let down, the abandonment by her mother.
Despite the implied emotion of family secrets Lloyd is not a sentimentalist. He describes his search for reasons behind his known world. Childhood, family home, pets, relatives. The shared habits of a lifetime, without undue fuss. Much like his parents’ generation, the worse sin is to make a scene or cause a fuss.
There are tiny fragments of his own life in the ‘now’, apart from the retracing of steps and revisiting the past. We learn he was asked to write about the Christchurch earthquake not long after it happened, but doesn’t get back to them. But perhaps a genesis for this book appears.
Other fragments occur with a mention once or twice about his own children, wife and a separation. But these are submerged by the wider purpose of the memoir. Which is looking back. To look inside himself. To get the answers the author has been denied. But as often happens, his parents have left the scene by the time this search really begins. They will not hear the resolutions.
Memories are such fragile things. I was stirred to write of my own search through family shame, sadness, brokenness and silence. There is a wider framework here, as many families have a silence. Unexplained ancestors, lost in time. Or lost to follow up as reports might say. The energy to do the follow up is huge. So well done to Lloyd Jones for having the fortitude and courage to go through the midst of time.
This was a book that was always at the top of its game and I relished it all.

[Inken · Rating 3 out of 5]

Author Lloyd Jones is sitting in his Cuba Street flat in Wellington, New Zealand, in 2011 when a massive earthquake strikes the city of Christchurch. Five weeks later he flies to Christchurch to see and write about the devastation and tremendous losses the city has suffered. Watching stonemasons dismantling the Cathedral stone by stone to put it back together triggers a desire in Jones to investigate (or dismantle) and reassemble his own family history, of which he knows almost nothing.

This is the story of a fractured family. Fractured by neglect, abandonment, death and grief. A mother born illegitimate, whose own mother gave her up in order to keep a new husband. (Sadly, the marriage rapidly degenerated into one of mutual resentment and violence.) A father orphaned and separated from his siblings, moving from one foster home to another. A sister with severe epilepsy that leads to her death. Grandparents are missing or believed dead, when in fact they lived on many years, only with a different family.

Throughout the memoir Jones returns to the theme of cities and structures built on a swamp – land that is unstable – but concreted over to create foundations that will eventually crumble and sink. The analogy to his own family history does have a tendency to beat you over the head (both his parents came from shaky backgrounds, histories that did not bear much scrutiny and which they preferred to cover with the concrete of buried memory) but it’s still a good one. Just as the fault lines beneath the ground of Christchurch ripped open the ground and destroyed buildings and lives, so do the fault lines in Jones’ family cause terrible damage.

Jones has no self-pity because he didn’t know, or had false information about, his family’s history, but his need to know where he came from comes through clearly in this memoir. Like many of us who have no information further back than our parents’ generation, there is no sense of missing out until he starts looking. What he finds creates a greater sense of empathy and pity for a grandmother who had abandoned her child but suffered enormously because of it, as well as a grandfather who, despite never knowing his child, tried to do his best by her.

[Alan Wightman · Rating 4 out of 5]

While walking the streets of Christchurch following the 2011 earthquakes, Lloyd Jones is struck by the hidden nature of things - that these seismic faults, this swampy foundation of the city, have only now been revealed. And surprisingly this leads him to consider his family, their own reluctance to reveal the past, their absence of history, their history of silence.

And so, Mr Jones goes digging into his family's past, and particularly the biography of his grandparents, none of whom he has met. A working class neighborhood in Lower Hutt in the 1960s, Jones' own childhood, is brought to life, and then we delve back deeper into the early part of the 20th century and even hazily the mid-19th. There are numerous beautiful, sad, and whimsical moments - the orphaned child who is suddenly brought to live with the Jones', the splendid and tender reveal of the identity of Jones' brother. And the heartache of perhaps the focus of the story - the relationship between Jones' grandmother Maud and his mother Joyce.

Jones seems to be at his strongest writing about the past (see also Book of Fame). When the story returns to Christchurch in the present, it's like being woken from a pleasant dream, and I want to go back to sleep. The Christchurch events are so recent (and I've had a hand in the re-build) that it's not so enjoyable to be reading about them. But also, as an engineer, I recall clearly being told about the liquefaction risk to the city at university a decade ago, so I didn't feel that the hypothesis of silence quite fitted, not that I doubt that Jones did.

Nonetheless, despite these minor misgivings, I found this to be an immersive and moving narrative.

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not entirely sure that the story of Jones's parents and that of the Christchurch earthquake (since he didn't live there) entirely mesh. Nevertheless, I really liked both. Jones's father was one of several children that were separated and parcelled out when his mother died. But it is Jones's mother's story that is astonishing. Her mother, Maud, had her out of wedlock and admitted to her husband to be, just before the wedding (she had told everyone she was widowed). Her husband carried out a campaign to have Maud give up her daughter and she finally did it at 4 years old. I guess the way Maud coped was by refusing to acknowledge her existence forever after.

[Rosemary · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jones is a beautiful writer. His intermingling of the Christchurch earthquake and his decision to research his family history are intertwined meaningfully. The earthquake is almost real to the reader and the reader is glad for the insight. His quest for the reason his mother sat for what seemed like hours in her car with her young son in the back seat, looking at a house waiting for a figure to come out so she could have a glimpse of it, is the saddest scene. The search is almost like a mystery story as is his quest to understand the earthquake. However, it didn't grip me as Mister Pip, his wonderful novel, did.

[Tuck · Rating 4 out of 5]

a bit of a mashup here, with automemoir-family mystery and genealogy-horrible earth quakes in new zealand 2010-2011-horrors of euro colonization on nz environments/fauna-meditations on travel and time erasing and creating "self"-being an artist-being a human slash family.
so lots going on and jones skips like malicious capricious wind here and there inside all things strings of thought.
his novel mr pip Mister Pip is devastatingly beautiful and true, and so is this thought experiment in destruction and family.

[Angela · Rating 3 out of 5]

So far I'm giving it a 3.8 but will wait until the end to see if the link about hidden things works. ( Family secrets compared with what is hidden or covered up after the Christchurch earthquakes.)
Certainly the details of the quake will be interesting to look back on, and I love the writing. I just sighed with relief as the book began, my last read while Entertaining must have left me with some doubts about the polish of the author's writing!

[Kate Wilson · Rating 1 out of 5]

I'm sorry but this book totally did my head in! I kept thinking it has to be a 100 pager ( when it takes a 100 pages to get going) then a 200 pager! Nup! If you can get through that far keep going - the last 40 or so are readable .... Only persevered as it was a book club book - after 9 years this was there first time ever I was the only one to finish the book and the other 6 were not embarrassed to say they just couldn't do it!

[zespri · Rating 2 out of 5]

Lloyd Jones takes a break from his usual fiction and delves into his own family history. He uses the Christchurch earthquake as a background for the shaking and unearthing of his search.

Unless you are a real Lloyd Jones fan I can't really see the appeal of this book, I was interested to see if there were any interesting insights to the earthquake that he might have documented, but on all fronts I did not find this an appealing or interesting read.

[Moira · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love Lloyd Jones' writing.It is vigorous and original. Here it is extra poignant as he traces his families' history and uncovers the secrets that shape his parents' lives. Interspersed with this history are his visits to damaged Christchurch after the quakes.
The book has extra significance to me as I know the area he grew up in and even went to school with his dynamic brother Bob Jones.

[Jyv · Rating 2 out of 5]

It was ok. I'd give it 2 1/2 stars. It rambled a bit from one topic to another and I totally skipped the Christchurch bits which seemed irrelevant. Some interesting family history, if a little poetic - so much so that I just wished he got on with it. Not something I would have picked up to read but it was given to me, so I did my duty.

[Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brilliant memoir about Jones discovering his family history at the time of the Christchurch earthquake. Reminded me in some ways of Terry Tempest-Williams Refuge, which makes similar connections between natural and personal cataclysm.

[Jo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Beautiful writing, poetic, but not very... accessible. The christchurch earthquake prompts Jones to unearth some family secrets. Maud's story is sad and would make a good novel.

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

I began this book some months ago, and for some reason only read a small chunk of it at that time. I read more in dribs and drabs over the next months, but only finally committed myself to finishing it in the last couple of weeks. The result is that by the time I came to finish it, I'd forgotten much of what the earlier part of the book was about. I remembered interesting details about the Christchurch earthquakes, and other discursive sections where it seemed as though Jones was riffing on his memories without putting them into a particular order.
But in the latter stages things seem to cohere, and we get to grips with the story about his seemingly hard-hearted grandmother, Maud, and Jones' own father and mother. His mother, Joyce, we gradually discover, had a harsh upbringing, and this was to some extent the cause of her somewhat difficult personality. But as we discover the story of her mother, Maud, we see how the apparent casual giving away of her daughter into adoption was nothing of the sort. The hugely disquieting story turns out to be that she found herself pregnant to the man she was housekeeping for, fled to Wellington and 'reinvented herself' as a widow, gave birth to her child, and became housekeeper to a widower who married her very shortly afterwards. Perhaps in a desire for honesty she told this man, on the eve of their wedding, what her true circumstances were. It was a disastrous move: he began to reject her child increasingly, and enormous conflict between the couple was the result. Maud gave her daughter, eventually, to another couple for adoption. Her daughter was ill-treated by the new mother as well. A few years later Maud and her husband went to court, before a jury, to sue for divorce. He accused her of brutal actions towards him, she accused him of equally brutal actions towards her. It's probable he was the real villain in this case, but she wasn't believed by the jury, though they did get their divorce.
There was never any real reconciliation between Maud and her daughter.
In the last pages of the book Jones searches out his true grandfather, and discovers a welcome from the now-deceased man's grandchildren; they had never known this other brother existed.
It's a tough and touching story. Jones is a superb writer, though he sometimes requires you to shift gears as quickly as he does. The vividness and reality of people he never knew as well as he thought is stark on the page. There's humour too; it's not all gloom and doom. But it does show how families have all manner of hidden stories. It takes a person with the willingness to research and dig deep to bring them to light.

[Bryce Galloway · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first 40 pages flow to and from the Christchurch Earthquakes, unearthing odd memories until a memoir is decided upon.
After that we head back to Wellington and the first memories of a more conventional chronology. Some metaphorical pairings don’t land (the concrete dispenser, the shell-shocked ejaculator) other’s sidle up to each other in a much more evocative way (concrete as erasure, the kitchen mincer). The major metaphor of the Christchurch quakes as ruptured present and past sits somewhat awkwardly after so many dead; at a remove as Jones grew up in Wellington, but connected by a fraught maternal line.
Eventually the detective work on the missing family narrative yields some great descriptive passages, invariably followed by poetic musings as to the meaning of it all or the feelings left in the wake of a sometimes fruitful/sometimes allusive search.

[Lilith_Amnvll · Rating 3 out of 5]

3/5. This book turned out quite different from what I had expected. The Christchurch earthquake serves less as the main topic and more as a catalyst for reflecting on the author’s own family history - a metaphor for the fractures and shifts in a life rather than the story itself.
While I could only relate to the biographical elements to a limited extent and didn’t find these personal accounts particularly moving, I did appreciate the, unfortunately brief yet often poetic, reflections on the interplay of past, present, and future; on the fractures and displacements in our lives; on the unspoken and the uncertain; and on the attempt to find words for the unsayable and to trace connections between worlds within worlds.

[Caroline Barron · Rating 4 out of 5]

"It was embarrassing to meet her first up like this. I felt even oddly implicated - she is my grandmother after all. We may not have set eyes on one another but she is partly responsible for the genes spilling around inside me, and so I found myself looking for and finding traces of recognition. . ." - p208

[Sally · Rating 2 out of 5]

Bit messy to read - perhaps he was intending to be clever weaving exploring the effects of the Christchurch earthquake with exploring his own family history? I got lost and possibly not interested in his family scandals and didn’t finish the book.

[Gypsy · Rating 2 out of 5]

DNF
Why did they get a woman to narrate a man's memoir?
Why did they not get someone who knows the correct pronunciation or words like Toetoe and Petone?

This had potential but dragged. So 30% in I am done.

[Tom · Rating 3 out of 5]

Author uses the Christchurch earthquakes as metaphor for the revelation of his hidden family history that he painfully extricates from its rubble.