Greek Lessons
Han Kang, Deborah Smith & Emily Yae Won (trans)
Greek Lessons
Han Kang, Deborah Smith & Emily Yae Won (trans)
In a classroom in Seoul, a young woman watches her Greek language teacher at the blackboard. She tries to speak but has lost her voice. Her teacher finds himself drawn to the silent woman, for day by day he is losing his sight.
Soon they discover a deeper pain binds them together. For her, in the space of just a few months, she has lost both her mother and the custody battle for her nine-year-old son. For him, it's the pain of growing up between Korea and Germany, being torn between two cultures and languages.
Greek Lessons tells the story of two ordinary people brought together at a moment of private anguish - the fading light of a man losing his vision meeting the silence of a woman who has lost her language. Yet these are the very things that draw them to one another. Slowly the two discover a profound sense of unity - their voices intersecting with startling beauty, as they move from darkness to light, from silence to expression.
Greek Lessons is a tender love letter to human intimacy and connection, a novel to awaken the senses, vividly conjuring the essence of what it means to be alive.
Review
Stephanie King
Greek Lessons is Han Kang’s latest novel to be translated into English by Deborah Smith and Emily Yae Won. Han Kang is best known for The Vegetarian, the version of which translated by Deborah Smith won the Man Booker International Prize in 2016. Greek Lessons follows The Vegetarian with a similarly eerie tone and deliciously unexpected use of language, however, Han’s latest work stretches language to its limits to explore the beauty and terror in meaning-making and engagement with the world.
A gloomy yet simultaneously brilliant novel, Greek Lessons interweaves two perspectives, one of a woman who has lost her ability to speak, and of her teacher who is slowly losing his sight. Through these entwining narratives, Han explores what it means to make meaning through language, and what it means to lose language. Greek Lessons spirals out from the intricate grammatical structures of ancient Greek, in particular ‘the middle voice’, which allows within a single word for a subject to be both acting and acted upon. As is often the case with novels housing two perspectives, in the beginning I found one voice more compelling than the other. But over the course of the novel both voices grew more and more enjoyable, especially as they began to complement each other, bringing a different perspective to the other’s without fully touching.
I found this novel its most fascinating when it touched on translation, not only between languages, but of how language translates the senses. It shone for me when it reached for beauty in philosophy and found that just the act of thinking was beautiful: ‘Simply because that wondering was sensually beautiful and touched the electrode inside me that feels beauty.’
Greek Lessons is philosophical, complex and stunningly beautiful. Han Kang is an utterly adroit writer. I hope anyone remotely interested in language or beauty picks up this novel.
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