Greek Lessons: From the International Booker Prize-winning author of The Vegetarian

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In truth, Han’s clean, masterful prose and subsequent critical acclaim have always belied a life-long struggle with language. Han has also won the Yi Sang Literary Prize, the Today's Young Artist Award and the Manhae Literary Prize.

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Han’s books often feature a meticulous, sustained attempt to describe inner states of being through glassily clear sentences in which sudden, unexpected images burst through. I was reminded of a Georgian film I watched a while back, My Happy Family, which revolves around a middle-aged woman who decides to leave her husband and family to live by herself and throughout the film refuses to explain her choice or back down from it. Kang imagines two isolated people both living in Seoul, one a lecturer in Ancient Greek who is gradually losing his sight, the other one of his pupils, a poet and teacher who’s lost custody of her child, and finds herself no longer able to speak. She walks miles across the city to the classroom, dressed in a black jacket, black scarf and black shirt – a ‘sombre uniform, which makes it seem as if she’s just come from a funeral’ – and devotes herself to the unfamiliar alphabet, verbs and nouns. During this battle against mortality, our power of speech becomes ragged, and ultimately the female protagonist loses her voice entirely.In this particular novel, we watch as on the screen, distant figures begin to merge, the lines growing sharper and clearer with every page, until at long last the camera focuses on a Greek class.

Han Kang’s ‘Greek Lessons’ - Frieze Losing Language in Han Kang’s ‘Greek Lessons’ - Frieze

But the elevation comes from its characters – vivid, full of flavour that punches out from the page – and from the startling use of original poetry which adds notes of striking poignancy. There is a sense of restraint and violence continually being held in balance; an insistence on indeterminacy, as strands of other narratives weave in and out of the story we believe we are being told.

On paper, the plot is simple, interrogating traditional romantic tropes through a queer lens and blending dark humour with pathos. Receding into a slim spectrum of being where she cannot be reached, she finally desires only to connect with the soil. Greek Lessons is a tender love letter to human connection, a novel to awaken the senses, vividly conjuring the essence of what it means to be alive.

Greek Lessons by Han Kang, Deborah Smith | Waterstones

The woman begins to attend lessons in ancient Greek taught at a private academy by the man (neither of them is named) and their meandering relationship begins to evolve. Published in South Korea on November 10, 2011, the book was received an English-language release on April 18, 2023 by Hogarth Press. Having just watched 'Persian Lessons(2020, Vadim Perelman)' today, I conclude this book is the most beautiful homage to language I have witnessed.Even wearing glasses with the highest power I could get, I still can’t make out the details of any of these things. As a young girl, the woman finds the sound of her own voice shameful compared with the terrible lucidity of language itself: “The most agonizing thing was how horrifyingly distinct the words sounded when she opened her mouth and pushed them out one by one.

Greek Lessons by Han Kang review – loss forges an intimate

She would appear then to agree with Yun’s assessment that Smith’s translation of The Vegetarian is a “new creation” – but has little problem with that. There is something interesting in examining Ancient Greek (both the structure of the language itself and the philosophy and literature written in it) to draw metaphors for how meaning is defined and derived in modern life, but honestly, the plot arc of an emotionally needy mute woman and an increasingly helpless blind man stumbling into a relationship of mutual aid wasn’t very satisfying to me. Photograph: Alamy Han Kang’s first novel to be translated into English, The Vegetarian, won the 2016 Man Booker International prize. These close-ups are often uncomfortable, but they do succeed in conveying with precision the characters’ experiences. A Greek lecturer has always known he will go blind, and a woman, a student of Greek, at one point loses the ability to speak.Spilling, soaking and dripping, messily, words are the incredible and imperfect system that we have developed to communicate. Han has been chosen to win the Malaparte Prize 2017 with the Italian translation of Human Acts, " Atti Umani" from Adelphi Edizioni, 2017 in Italy on 1 October 2017. All I can say is, thank goodness Han Kang’s literary voice takes up space in the world in the way her female characters struggle to. As a mute teenager, she learned to exist beyond language, “absorbing the flow of time like balls of cotton”; now, recently bereaved by the death of her mother and by the loss of custody of her son following a divorce, she retreats again, into the featureless privacy of her apartment by day and the streets by night, attempting to exhaust herself enough to sleep. The woman’s difficulties in conveying and articulating her thoughts and feelings definitely resonated with me.