In the winter of 1954, in a construction camp for a hydroelectric dam in the remote Tasmanian highlands, three-year-old Sonja Buloh lived with her Slovenian immigrant parents. One night, Sonja's mother Maria walked off into a blizzard, never to return-leaving Sonja with a father who drinks too much to quiet the ghosts of World War II. Thirty-five years later, Sonja has returned to Tasmania to make peace with a past that intrudes ever more forcefully into her present. As their story unfolds, it will transform forever Sonja's guarded, empty existence and her father's living death. The Sound of One Hand Clapping is about the rough lives of laborers in a young country; about the barbarism of the old world left behind; about people apparently without hope, seeking redemption and healing through love.
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From Publishers Weekly:
Tasmania--vast, mysterious, like "the unknown country of the heart"--is the setting for this powerful tale of a father and daughter who struggle to rise above the forces of history and personal tragedy. Sonja Buloh barely remembers the night 35 years ago when her mother, Maria, walked out the door of their crude hut in the dismal construction camp at remote Butlers Gorge, never to return. The mystery and heartache surrounding that event echo through Sonja's young life all the way to 1989-90, when the pregnant Sonja returns from mainland Australia, longing to see Tasmania and her estranged father. Bojan Buloh was just another "reffo" from a Slovenia ravaged by WWII, recruited "to do the wog work of dam-building," when he found himself the lone parent of three-year-old Sonja. Bojan's poverty and his memories of his wife and of wartime atrocities made Sonja's childhood difficult; his brief hopes for another marriage were dashed, and Bojan fell into drinking and beating his daughter. Sonja's painful memories mix with those of her sober artie's (the affectionate Slovenian word for father) tenderness and his inspired woodworking ("his hands knew a restraint which lent him grace"). Though her father cannot articulate his suffering (one of the themes here is the inadequacy of words to express the totality of existence), she remains bound to him in deep understanding of his despair. Only after confrontations, revelations and Bojan's symbolic and apocalyptic rebirth is the past redeemed and the pair reconciled. Australian writer Flanagan (Death of a River Guide) brilliantly illuminates the lives of those who are "forgotten by history, irrelevant to history, yet shaped entirely by it." His characters here transform tragedy as they discover their individual worth. (Mar.) FYI: Flanagan won the Australian Booksellers Book of the Year Award for The Sound of One Hand Clapping. He directed a film, released in Australia and Germany, based on the novel.
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- PublisherMacmillan
- Publication date1997
- ISBN 10 0732908965
- ISBN 13 9780732908966
- BindingHardcover
- Edition number1
- Number of pages425
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Rating