![]() But there so many times when he just seems to forget she exists, leaving her sitting in the car outside a bar all night while he gets steadily sozzled. They enjoy intermittent moments of tenderness when he makes her the first party dress she’d ever owned and they spend weekends at his girlfriend’s farm. The tension between her and her father are at times unbearable. The chase was always different but the end was inevitably the same: the lace had disappeared into the wind. Sometimes she had a dream in which there was a piece of lace billowing in front of her and when she went to grab it the lace would simply blow away. … the only word she had for those traces of her past, the single, strange inexplicable word was lace. All she has left of her mother are fragments of memories the lullaby her mother sang on the night she disappeared, the lace on her collar and her footsteps in the snow that the child tried to follow. Both block his ability to grasp the one remaining good thing in his life: his daughter. The Sound Of One Hand Clapping shows a man haunted by memories of his past and by the loss of the woman he loves. What I loved about this book was the psychological sensitivity shown in Richard Flanagan’s portrayal of these two emotionally damaged people. When sober again he has no memory of what he’s done and becomes tender once more.īut she never forgets. When he’s drunk he beats her, sometimes so savagely that her blood spatters the walls of their home. He adores the child but as his alcoholism worsens and she grows older, that love evaporates. The young Sonja is offloaded into the care of other families so her father can go to work. More significantly the novel traces the decline of his relationship with his daughter. They reveal Bojan’s memories of killings and piled up corpses from clashes between Nazis and Slovenians, his love for Maria and his descent into depression-fuelled alcoholic binges after she disappeared. Is she hoping for a reconciliation or does she simply want an answer to the question that has plagued her throughout her life: why did her mother leave?įlanagan zig zags between the present and the present in 38 short chapters told from the perspectives of both Bojan and Sonja. Thirty five years later Sonja goes back to Tasmania to seek out her father. She disappears into a blizzard, never to return. Yet Bojan and his wife Maria, having fled the atrocities of war in Slovenia, see this as the start of a new life.īut one night during the winter of 1954 Maria walks out of their home, leaving behind her husband and a three year old daughter Sonja. It’s physically demanding work that most Australians view with distaste. A Place of Safetyīojan Buloh is one of the many refugees employed there to build huge dams that will convert the region’s abundant water resources into hydroelectric power. The novel begins in 1954 at a construction workers’ camp in the highlands of Tasmania. The result is a beautifully written tale that astutely examines despair and pain but holds out a glimmer of hope for the future. Richard Flanagan’s second novel puts the lives of one family into a sweeping historical context of war and the search for fresh beginnings in a new land. Long after I’ll have forgotten the plot details and the names of the characters, I will remember the atmosphere of the book and the emotions I experienced when reading it. ![]() The slow mesmeric motion of its luminous lines dissolve the film into silence.The Sound Of One Hand Clapping is one of those novels that has leaves an indelible mark on my mind. The film ends with the erection of a large public sculpture : White Koan. Solid volumes, formal and mathematical, are animated and become organic. The word transforms into a line of colour that defines the space better than volume. Words are made to become vibrations, returned to their essence, becoming the energy of their potential meaning. The sculptures seen here are all cones/koans that transform matter into energy, volume into vibration. ![]() A series of sculptures are filmed that connect the idea of emptying the mind with the dematerialising of volume or matter. It is a play on the words – cone and koan – both of which have at least a phonetic resemblance. The title of the film is a well known Japanese “koan”, a zen riddle given to Buddhist monks as an aid to meditation. All of these sculptures attempt in one way or another to empty the mind, dematerialise volume, and transform matter into energy. An example of seminal work combining language and time, the film documents Lijn’s work with cones from 1964 till 1972.
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