The Sound of One Hand Clapping

Years after leaving the home where she had grown up with an alcoholic father and a mother who disappeared one day in the middle of a blizzard, Sonja Buloh returns to Tasmania to make peace with her tortured past. 30,000 first printing.

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.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Winner of the Australian Booksellers Book of the Year Award, a passionate working-class tale (and first US publication) from a Tasmanian author. In 1989, an unhappy woman, Sonja Buloh, returns to remotest Tasmania to revisit scenes of her tortured childhood and to have a baby. Much of Flanagans story, though, is in flashback, being comprised of the tale, set in 1954, of Sonjas father, Bojan, and his wife, Maria. Bojan and Maria are Slovenians who immigrated to Australia so that Maria could work on backcountry hydroelectric projects, then touted as the great precursor to prosperity much as such projects were in the American West. Maria, however, is bored and unsatisfied with her life and wanders off to her death in a blizzard, leaving Bojan to raise Sonja alone. Hes a sentimental man who loves to work with wood, but hes also afflicted by his memories of war and by his eternal grieving for Maria. Depressed, he takes to drink, and when hes drunk he beats his young daughter. Sober again, he has no memory of what hes done, though Sonja is profoundly traumatized. Even as an adult in faraway Sydney, she finds herself unable to trust any man enough to fall in loveindeed, her out-of-wedlock baby seems almost immaculately conceived. Upon her return, nevertheless, daughter and father become reconciled; it is almost as if Sonja is the reappeared Maria, and her baby Sonjas own infant self. Everyone is given another chance. Even the land reverts to its primitive state, the dam breaking at last in concert with these revitalized lives, as if its violation of nature had caused human woes, too. In his soap-opera plotting and authentic feel for working people, Flanagan owes much to Colleen McCullough. But theres no denying the power in his own wild flights of prose. (First printing of 30,000) -- Copyright ©2000, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Winner of the Australian Booksellers Book of the Year in 1997, this, Flanagan's second book, relates the story of Slovenian immigrant Bojan Buloh and his daughter, Sonja. Buloh, scarred by the World War II horrors he has witnessed, emigrates with his wife, Maria, to labor on Tasmania's hydro dams. When Sonja is three, Maria walks out into a blizzard and is never seen again. Written in poetic prose, sometimes verging on purple, the book's 86 short chapters veer wildly back and forth, often with no apparent purpose, from 1954 to the 1960s and on to 1990. There are some stunning set pieces--a tiny abandoned girl methodically breaking her tea set--but the story is largely one of repetitive brutality and alienation. The inarticulate and alcoholic Buloh, longing for the absent Maria and haunted by visions of evil, beats the teenage Sonja until she freezes all feeling. Collections of immigrant fiction will want this; for others, it is optional.
---Judith Kicinski, Sarah Lawrence Coll. Lib., Bronxville, NY
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.