Book Revew- The Sound of One Hand Clapping

My First Read of 2014

A review of Richard Flanagan’s

The Sound of One Hand Clapping

 

            An Australian woman, a lover of books, wrote in glowing terms of reading a book by Richard Flanagan, and thinking something like “Here I have in my hands the book which might take the Miles Franklin Award and they all just want to watch the Bachelor.”  She was referring to a different book by Richard Flanagan, and the Miles Franklin Award, a prestigious literary award given for a “novel which is of the highest literary merit and presents Australian life in any of its phases.”  I had come to know of this Australian woman through Twitter and decided to try to find the book and failing to find it in America discovered how The Sound of One Hand Clapping was available.  I asked her about the book and she spoke of it as powerful and unsettling.  That it is.

            Somewhere as the past year morphed into a new year, another friend from Twitter posted a link to an article that said on average an American reads “0” books in a year.  The average American does not read a book in a year.  I had managed to do only slightly better than that last year, and over the years I have read only a few books a year, some years very few.  I wanted that to change, and so I decided to read at least fifteen pages a day from at least one book until I finished a book and started on another.  I hate to admit how many years I have passed without reading a novel, so I started by reading this one.  I am grateful for having been drawn to this choice.

            It is as my Australian acquaintance noted an unsettling novel.  It is a book which takes you inside the evolving lives and self-understanding of a father named Bujan Bulow and his daughter Sonja.  Their lives evolve not in chronological order but in the order of their memories as they gradually perceive who they are and how they fit into the world.  They don’t fit all that well but where there is life there is the possibility of a turning point in life.  There can be the turning point where one moves towards a downward spiraling descent towards self-destruction.  Or there may be a turning point where one begins to sense a meaning and purpose upon which a life may grow and take hope and be shaped towards the possibility of the future.

            The novel brings to life many of the modern issues, not in a preachy way but in the form of the human beings presented.  Faith is not central in the words describing it, but its possibility is hinted at in such a way that it is clearly not something merely peripheral to the human experience.  Bujan Bulow’s life is haunted by a past that included his being caught in the malaise of the World War II’s horrendous “Eastern Front.”  It is also shaped by his life as an immigrant, a wog, who lives in Australia but will never really be viewed as an Australian.

Flanagan masterfully connects the shaping power of suffering in life to the possibility of a horrendous cycle of ruined lives.  The cycle that began in wartime atrocities, generates haunted persons forming dysfunctional families, resulting in self-destructive vices and ruined self-perceptions that seem to further predestine a hopeless result for the future.  But still there is the human spirit capable of discovering revival and yet also fragile that a movement towards personal renewal can be so easily snuffed out by a single moment when the fragility of the human soul gives way and despondency overwhelms the desire for renewal.

            There is a sense in which Bujan Bulow’s life and the life of his daughter Sonja are inescapably connected and belong together.  Yet their stories are still distinct and individual.

            I don’t want to ruin the plot for you if you haven’t read it.  But one of the features I love in the book is how the book is written to promote a sense of the changing self-perceptions of how Bujan and Sonja perceive their lives.  Their self-identities are not shaped by mere chronological progressions.  The present is always shaped by the past, and yet the past is always remembered by the changing sense of the present, and the self-perception of both builds a sense of what can be accomplished and expected from the future.  So Flanagan takes us on a journey from the 1950’s to the very early 1990’s in which life goes back and forth, experiencing, remembering, expecting back and forth as self-perception is shaped, reshaped, and directed and re-directed.  This is how this novel becomes not just a book with a plot but an exploration of humanity.   A dismal past and a dismal present may create a fatalistic sense of total inability for one to hope or expect anything but more defeats and destruction for one’s own future.

That is part of the unsettling nature of this book.  For when one has no sense of hope, there is a perception that life is brutal, and if life is brutal then one survives only by learning to be hard and brutal.  How can one hardened and brutalized in life begin to take hope?  For one it might be a decision to stay somewhere and not to flee their unfolding life as they have always fled the struggles abounding in life.  For another it might be that however horrible the life of a wog, and the lives of fellow wogs might be, there is still something that one lowly wog can do to create a bit of beauty in life for another lowly wog.  So somewhere small there is a nearly imperceptible change, but that change is something that can be built on, that helps make the present meaningful, helps to remember the past differently, and creates a different possibility for the future.

            This is my first book finished in 2014.  It is an accomplishment to finish a book so early in the year.  I am grateful for the person who recommended it to me, for while it is true that this book can be deeply unsettling it can also be wonderfully glorious.  I count it a masterpiece, but I’m not a literary critic, just someone who happened to read a book that captured his imagination, his heart, and his soul.