#One hand clapping review skin

I will start it tonight (now which bookshelf is it on. For about 6 years it has sat unread in my bookshelves because IвЂ™d heard so many negative comments about how boring it was. Now IвЂ™m glad I didnвЂ™t toss вЂњThe Sound of One Hand ClappingвЂќ into the St Vinnies box when I packed up house. It was made into a film directed by Richard Flanagan in 1998. This critically acclaimed novel won the 1998 Victorian PremierвЂ™s Prize for Best Novel, the 1999В ABA Australian Book of the Year Prize and was shortlisted for the 1998 Miles Franklin Award. For that reason alone, it is a refreshing - and challenging - read. It does not shy away from presenting white Australians as uncouth, uncultured and racist at a period in the countryвЂ™s history at which immigration was running at an all-time high. The Sound of One Hand Clapping is a book about new beginnings that shatters the myth of Australia as the вЂњlucky countryвЂќ. Her lifeвЂ™s story is then told in aВ series of flashbacks intercut with chapters from BojanвЂ™s point of view. It is only when she is about to become a motherВ herself that she decides to re-establish contact, returning to TasmaniaВ to make amends with her now elderly father.

Sonja, unbearably miserable, eventuallyВ flees to the mainland. Bojan drowns his grief in drink and struggles to makeВ a decent life for his daughter. What enfolds over the next 35 years is essentially the nub of thisВ compelling novel. One stormy evening Maria packs her bags and leaves her husband andВ three-year-old daughter Sonja behind. Here the weatherВ is harsh and living conditions primitive. Bojan, along with hundreds of other European immigrants, finds work as a labourer on a construction project to build a massiveВ hydroelectric dam in the rugged Tasmanian highlands. The story begins in 1954 when Slovenian couple Bojan and MariaВ Buloh, both scarred by the horrors of the Second World War, immigrateВ to Australia. Hypnotic and unbearably sad inВ places, itвЂ™s a very human tale about two people locked together by a shared past who struggle to rise above the pain of their circumstances.

#One hand clapping review skin

InВ that long Autumn of 1959, when elsewhere the world was sensing changeВ so big and hard in its coming that it was like the trembling of the earth announcing the arrival of a yet to be seen locomotive, in that month of April in the city of Hobart, nothing much looked like it could ever change around a town that had grown used to never being anything but the arse end of everything: mean, hard and dirty, where civic ambition meant buying up old colonial buildings and bulldozing them quick and covering the dust promptly with asphalt for cars most people were yet to own, where town pride meant tossing any unlucky ferro foundВ lying in the park into the can, and where a sense of community equated with calling anybody with skin darker than fair a boong bastard unless he worse snappy clothes in which case he was a filthy wog bastard - in that month of April when the cold slowly began its winterвЂ™s journey, spreading its way down over weeks from the mountainвЂ™s steel-blue flanks, on an early Saturday morning, an FJ was wending its way throughВ the scummy back streets of north Hobart to the home of Umberto Picotti.ДЄnd it can be hard to get a foothold on the essence of theВ story when the narrative is non-linear, shunting backwards and forwardsВ in time, and told from two different perspectives.Д«ut in many ways this is what makes The Sound of One Hand Clapping suchВ a wonderfully rich and beguiling read. Initially I wrestledВ with the writing style, because Flanagan is prone to overly-longВ sentences that sometimes so twist and bend out of shape you feel likeВ youвЂ™re riding a rollercoaster: This is a book that possesses a strangely heady mix of bleakness andВ despair, tempered by moments of clarity and joy. Like GouldвЂ™s Book of Fish, both are set in Tasmania, an island state of Australia, where the author resides.ДЄt its most basic level The Sound of One Hand Clapping is about the strained relationship between a father and daughter, but it is far more complicated than that, touching on a wide range of issues including poverty, alcoholism, domestic violence and wartime atrocities, all set within the social and historical context of AustraliaвЂ™s immigrant past. Prior to this Flanagan had written two other novels: Death of a River Guide, in 1994, and The Sound of One Hand Clapping, in 1997. The book went on to win the Commonwealth Writers Prize in 2002. This one, my third in a matter of weeks, is by Richard Flanagan, who first came to international prominence with GouldвЂ™s Book of Fish, which I read several years ago and loved very much.

I seem to be on a roll with Australian books. Fiction вЂ“ paperback Grove Press 425 pages 1997.