By Phan Ming Yen

Greek Lessons
Han Kang
Hamish Hamilton (2023) / 160 pages / SGD 36.70  

It seems almost an irony, a sacrilege and a crime to write a review of Greek Lessons, Korean novelist Han Kang's fourth novel to be translated into English.

One of the major themes of the book after all – as various reviewers on both sides of the Atlantic who raved about Greek Lessons when it was first released in the English-speaking world in 2023 – is about language, the limitations of language and what happens when language is at its limits.

For poet and novelist Em Strang in her review for The Guardian, that which steers the book is not so much its plot but "its language and dissolution of language" while The Atlantic headlined its review 'A Novel in Which Language Hits its Limit – And Keeps on Going'. Another reviewer for The Guardian felt that the book explored "the extent to which this sudden disappearance of words… amounts to a more catastrophic rupture with language."

The plot of the novel can be reduced to that of an unnamed Korean woman who has suddenly lost her ability to communicate through speech (a condition which has occurred to her once when she was a teenager) taking Greek lessons in a class that is taught by an unnamed Korean man who in turn is losing his sight as a result of an unnamed condition. A relationship begins to develop between student and teacher.

The novel alternates between the viewpoint of the man (told in first person) and the woman (in third person). It is told in the form of a collage of memories and incidents, musings on the grammar and structure of Greek, and finally, in free verse, as if the collapse of the form of a novel reflects the failure of language (whether spoken or written) as a means of communication.

The woman has chosen to learn Greek because it was the sound of a French word in the midst of a French lesson she took in school (while she was still suffering from her malady of loss of speech) which helped her regained her speech back then. When the novel opens, because 20 years ago, "she had failed to predict that an unfamiliar language, one with little or no resemblance to her mother tongue, would break her own silence", she thus had "chosen to learn Ancient Greek… because she wants to reclaim language of her own volition… Had a lecture course been offered in Burmese or Sanskrit, languages that use an even more unfamiliar script, she would have chosen them instead."

The woman is not without trauma: she has just undergone a divorce, lost custody of her only son and her mother has recently died. Her psychotherapist – whom she communicates with via writing – attributes her loss of speech to those factors. But for her, "It isn't as simple as that."

The man, on the other hand, is coping with a sense of displacement and dislocation: his family had moved to Germany when he was child, but he has chosen to return to Korea. His memories are plagued by a youthful crush on a girl who had lost her hearing faculty, an abusive father and the early death of a friend.

More central to the concept of the book, however, is an existential question posed by the woman's very presence. What does it mean when someone does not like the idea that her or his body is occupying space? The woman is described as someone who "just didn't like taking up space. Everyone occupies a certain amount of physical space according to their body mass, but voice travels far beyond that. She had no wish to disseminate her self."

By the time all this is established in the first one third or so of this slim novel of 148 pages, this reader found himself plunged into a world of silence and darkness: no one really can say anything (or wants to say anything), hear anything or see anything. All there is left is physical contact to express emotions between two people, contact which is made only at the end, after nearly 140 pages.

Strangely, this compact solution to a catastrophic condition, where encountering the world through sight and sound is no longer possible, is already hinted at midway through the novel when the short-lived friend of the male protagonist says: "…if I ever put a book in my name, I want there to be a Braille edition. I want someone to glide their hand over each letter… That would be… I guess real connection, a way for us to really touch…"

What then is left to say about such a novel? If the protagonist is one who has no "wish to disseminate her self", is writing a review about a book with such a protagonist not an act of intrusion into and violation of the character's being?

Perhaps what is left to say then could be a guide on one possible approach to appreciate this novel.

In the chronology of Han's works, Greek Lessons which first appeared in Korean in 2011 comes after The Vegetarian of 2007 (the first of her novels to be translated into English and winner of the 2016 Man Booker International Prize) about a woman whose decision to turn vegetarian after a dream subsequently triggers a series of cataclysmic events within her family, and before Human Acts (2014, translated into English in 2016) about the Gwangju Uprising and The White Book (2016, translated into English in 2017) which is a series of meditations on the theme of death.

While the two novels after The Vegetarian and before Greek Lessons have yet to be translated into English, if read in chronological order of writing, Greek Lessons is like a balm after the frenetic and almost breathless hysteria of The Vegetarian. In The Vegetarian, one reads with the anticipation and fear for the female protagonist, asking "What is going to happen next?"; with Greek Lessons, one wonders if and when anything is going to happen at all.

Reading the book is akin to watching "slow cinema", that is, cinema characterised by minimalism, austerity, extended duration and long takes, and the downplaying of drama and action. Like watching a scene of three minutes or so in Tsai Ming-liang's 2003 film Goodbye, Dragon Inn, which shows in almost real time a physically impaired ticket-seller walking through a corridor, climbing two flights of stairs and then walking through another corridor and climbing one more flight of steps to deliver a bun to the projectionist she has affections for.

Imagine that scene stretched out over 140 pages and you will feel the pain and anguish of the protagonists of Greek Lessons. Han's eye to detail, sensitivity to every breath her protagonists take, mindfulness to their suffering and sense of pacing of each chapter is impeccable. The final two-thirds (or eight out of 13 pages) of Chapter 11, for instance, is an almost step-by-step description of the woman's walk home from the Greek class with her attendant memories during the walk, while the first third of the chapter is a prelude to that journey.

At the end of it all though, one cannot help but wonder about an alternate reality to Greek Lessons: How would the book have turned out if the woman had chosen another language instead of Greek? Han's discourse on the complexities of the Greek language and the philosophy of the Greeks are themselves a commentary on the plight of her protagonists. But what if the woman had chosen Burmese or Sanskrit, assuming they had been offered at the academy? How would "Burmese Lessons" or "Sanskrit Lessons" have turned out?

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