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The Sound of One Hand Clapping

Richard Flanagan

Why we're reading this: In the winter of 1954, in a construction camp that festered like a bad wound in the remote Tasmanian high…more
[close] In the winter of 1954, in a construction camp that festered like a bad wound in the remote Tasmanian highlands, when Sonja Buloh was three years old and her father was drinking too much, Sonja's mother walked into a blizzard never to return.

Some thirty-five years later, when Sonja visits Tasmania and her drunkard father, the shadows of the past begin to intrude ever more forcefully into the present - changing forever his living death and her ordered life.

Famous Australian novel that was turned into a movie in 1998.

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Dec 01, 2022 PattyMacDotComma rated it really liked it

Shelves: australian-author, award-win-listed, aa-col, fiction, kindle, politics-culture-social-war, historical-fiction, aa

4.5★
“For Sonja, the town of Tullah did not so much nestle in that high valley with wild mountains around all sides, as appear to be an industrial accident swept up into orderly piles, left sinking into swampy ground. Everybody, everything was temporary. Except the rainforest and the buttongrass that would come back when this brief intrusion was over.”

Sonja grew up in Butlers Gorge, a construction camp in northwest Tasmania, not far from Tullah, where her father now lives. Her Slovenian parents h ...more

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Mar 18, 2010 Velvetink rated it it was amazing

Shelves: fiction, australia-new-zealand, war, film, historical-fiction, read-2010

I knew the title was a koan, but had to look it up......

"What is the Sound of the Single Hand clapping? When you clap together both hands a sharp sound is heard; when you raise the one hand there is neither sound nor smell. Is this the High Heaven of which Confucius speaks? Or is it the essentials of what Yamamba describes in these words: "The echo of the completely empty valley bears tidings heard from the soundless sound?" This is something that can by no means be heard with the ear. If concep I knew the title was a koan, but had to look it up......

"What is the Sound of the Single Hand clapping? When you clap together both hands a sharp sound is heard; when you raise the one hand there is neither sound nor smell. Is this the High Heaven of which Confucius speaks? Or is it the essentials of what Yamamba describes in these words: "The echo of the completely empty valley bears tidings heard from the soundless sound?" This is something that can by no means be heard with the ear. If conceptions and discriminations are not mixed within it and it is quite apart from seeing, hearing, perceiving, and knowing, and if, while walking, standing, sitting, and reclining, you proceed straightforwardly without interruption in the study of this koan, you will suddenly pluck out the karmic root of birth and death and break down the cave of ignorance. Thus you will attain to a peace in which the phoenix has left the golden net and the crane has been set free of the basket. At this time the basis of mind, consciousness, and emotion is suddenly shattered; the realm of illusion with its endless sinking in the cycle of birth and death is overturned." p.164, Yabukoji, in The Zen Master Hakuin: Selected Writings, Translated by Philip B. Yampolsky,

In the winter of 1954, in a remote Tasmanian hydroelectric construction camp of migrant workers, Sonja Buloh’s mother walks out of their hut, leaving her three year old daughter alone. Her distraught father Bojan perseveres with the dream of a new life in a new country, but he is soon crushed into an alcoholic despair. By the time Sonja turns 16, she is driven to leave him. Nearly 20 years later, single and pregnant, she returns to Tasmania’s highlands and her father, in an attempt to put the pieces of her life into some perspective. Initial awkwardness and pain notwithstanding, she slowly unravels her family’s history, especially a secret she never knew about her vanished mother.

This is also about a hidden dark side of Australia's multiculturalism, of the struggle of migrants & refugees in a new unfamiliar land, in a time when there were no counsellors and people were expected to get on with living and not talk about their past. While Sonja and her family are from war torn Slovenia you don't find too many facts about it here and although Bojan does talk about it briefly, it's more their emotional limbo & pain you become immersed in as you read, & not so much the particulars of their past horrors. Personally would have liked more background about their life in Slovenia, but it isn't that kind of story - it's not a history in that sense. Flanagan manages to get inside Sonja's head so well you begin to think the writer might be a woman. On the other hand sometimes I felt Bojan's character a little typecast and undeveloped until the end of the book where he begins to blossom and find hope and redemption. Perhaps that was Flanagan's way to show him speechless & lost in a new land.

While not all migrants suffered like Bojan's family when they arrived in Australia, from what I know the hydroelectric construction camp in Tasmania was remote and conditions would have been hard & bleak. As a child I visited the Snowy River Scheme in NSW with my parents, my father thinking of working there. My mother took one look at the camps and refused point blank. Not everyone would have had that option. The Snowy River Scheme took 25 years to build and was completed in 1974. More than 100,000 people from over 30 countries came to work in the mountains. It makes you think what were their stories and were they redeemed like Bojan?.
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About to re-read this again (2010), I was distracted the first time around (2000).

This is also a film, has anyone seen it?

Halfway through.
So far.... Infinitely sad, infinitely brutal, infinitely beautiful. ...more

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