- This new novel from the Man Booker International Prize winner Han Kang is very unlike her winning novel The Vegetarian, which was a superb and savage critique of South Korea’s abusive political, social and cultural conservatism. Greek Lessons is more a drama of personal fragilities and social isolation.
- An unnamed Korean woman in her mid thirties, living in Seoul, suddenly loses her ability to speak. She suffered this condition as a child but recovered. She is referred to throughout as 'the woman'. She has an eight year old son who was brutally taken away from her by the family court to be raised by her former unsympathetic husband.
- The other main character is an unnamed language teacher. He went to Germany with his parents when he was fifteen and spent seventeen years there. Now in his thirties he has returned to Seoul and taken up an academic position as a teacher of ancient Greek. In the first person tense he reflects about when he fell in love with a young deaf woman in Germany. She was the daughter of his ophthalmologist and totally rejected his advances. His eyesight was seriously deteriorating.
- The 'woman' has been seeing a therapist for her speech issue but after five months there has been no change. What she found most intolerable was his claim that he understood her. She decides not to see him again and just live with her condition. She does enrol however in an ancient Greek course at a local academy.
- The man's letters to his younger sister Ran, who is still in Germany, are very engaging. He details how he is coping with his increasing blindness. But we also learn of their distance from their abusive father who was 'a heartless man'. His brilliant friend Joachim died at the age of thirty six. He had long suffered from serious ailments, but he was a deep philosophical thinker with profound and beautiful thoughts and ideas that challenged the man on all levels. Sensual frailties never got in the way of the important sources of vitality and meaning.
- The final part of the novel explores the developing relationship between the woman and her lecturer, and the ways each deal with their fragility. They’re both very aware of nature, the seasons, and the bustling streets, lights, and traffic of the city. And, alone, they walk around a lot. They seem to be celebrating the senses they still have and the joy they give them. The man doesn't recognise colour, only different shades of black.
- Entering the academy one evening he trips and falls, cutting himself and breaking his glasses. She sees the incident and rushes to his aid. She takes him home, a small apartment, where over the course of the night he opens up to her about his anxious uptight mother and his brusque father. As Asians they experienced constant racism in Germany.
- Hang has given us a novel that explores so many levels of personal travail and sorrow. Alongside profound reflections on Plato, Socrates and Greek philosophy in general, we're immersed in very different shades of darkness, whether deep family wounds or failed aspirations and dreams. In contrast to beauty.
- The novel ends with a loving embrace between the man and the woman. It is very tender and emotional. Beauty is deep within us and around us and will never be extinguished.
- The novel is so well written and flawlessly translated it is a real joy to read. Sheer poetry.
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