The Sound of One Hand Clapping (Magill’s Literary Annual 2001)
At a glance:
- Author: Richard Flanagan
- First Published: 2000
- Type of Work: Novel
- Time of Work: The 1950’s and 1990
- Setting: Small work villages on Tasmania; Sydney, Australia
- Principal Characters: Bojan Buloh, Maria Buloh, Sonja Buloh
- Genres: Long fiction
- Subjects: 1950’s, Parents and children, Suicide, Twentieth century, Child abuse, Pregnancy, Fathers, Nazism or Nazis, 1990’s, Refugees, Dams or reservoirs, Australia or Australians
- Locales: Sydney, Australia, Tasmania
The novel opens ominously with a woman named Maria Buloh surreptitiously leaving her home to trudge off in the snow for an unspecified destination. As she prepares, her three-year-old daughter, Sonja, awakens and calls for her mother. Through a succession of eighty-six short chapters, the narrative shuffles between events in the 1950’s and the thirty-eight-year-old Sonja’s pregnancy in 1990.
Sonja and her father, Bojan, are refugees from Nazi-occupied Slovenia and have relocated to Tasmania in the hope of obtaining Australian citizenship and a better life. Like other refugees...
[The entire page is 2078 words long]
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