When the Greek lesson is over, she walks the dark streets as she has always done. The vehicles on the road speed past daringly as they always do. Motorbikes carrying midnight snacks in red metal boxes weave in and out of the traffic, ignoring both lanes and lights. Past drunks young or old, weary workers in skirt suits or short-sleeved shirts, elderly women staring blankly from the entrance of empty restaurants, she carries on walking.
The first novel I read by Han Kang — International Booker winner The Vegetarian — was pretty much my idea of perfection: weird and affecting, equally engaging my heart and mind, it drew me in and taught me something of what it is to be a woman in modern-day South Korea. But Kang is no one-trick pony, no two of her books are quite alike, and while each of the novels I have read by her since has been undeniably well-written, none of them has quite sparked that original magic for me again. Greek Lessons is something new yet again — poetic and philosophical, it twines the stories of a woman who has unexpectedly lost the ability to speak with that of a man who is slowly losing his sight — and for the most part, I found the plot kind of predictable and bland; the two voices confusing in their interchangeability. I’m not disappointed to have read this — Kang’s sentences are delightful — and I’m rounding down to three stars as a rating against her earlier work. (Note: I read an ARC and passages quoted may not be in their final forms. Spoilerish from here.)
“Are you okay, seonsaengnim?” asked the young woman with the curly hair and sweet eyes who sat at the very front of the class. The woman had tried to force a smile, but all that happened was that her eyelids spasmed for a while. Trembling lips pressed firmly together, she muttered to herself from somewhere deeper than her tongue and throat: It’s come back.
For the second time in her life, “the woman” finds herself suddenly, physically, incapable of speaking; even the noises she makes breathing make her feel tense and nauseous. The first time this happened (as a teenager), she felt the dam burst during a French lesson and she regained the power of speech. This time — after the death of her mother and recently losing a custody battle for her son, then losing her job as a lecturer with the loss of her voice — she decides to take lessons in Ancient Greek at the community college; at least it fills a few of her empty hours even if there’s no quick miracle forthcoming.
Interspersed with the woman’s tortured musings on her life and predicament (presented in an omniscient third-person POV) are scenes from the Greek teacher’s life, told in both first-person and second-person POVs as he intermittently mentally addresses the friend of his youth who had been his first (unrequited) love. Suffering a congenital eye disorder, he has always known that blindness was in his future, but perversely, not only has he refused to learn Braille, but he left his expat family in Germany to return to the Seoul of his childhood and attempt to live his dimming life on his own terms.
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. Their stories twin and twine in the fine details, too (in a way that wasn’t to my liking), as when the man finds himself in inexplicable tears:
There are times when my eyes burn and suddenly start to water; when these tears, which are but physiological, fail to stop for some reason, I quietly turn away from the road and wait for the moment to pass.
And the woman finds herself incapable of tears despite her recent losses:
She wipes her cheeks, dry as ever, with the back of her hand. If only she’d made a map of the route her tears used to take. If only she’d used a needle to engrave pinpricks, or even just traces of blood, over the route where the words used to flow. But, she mutters, from a place deeper than tongue and throat, that was too terrible a route.
Rather than try to guess what the author means by all of this, I’ll let Kang herself explain by quoting from an interview found on Korea.net:
In "Greek Lessons," we are introduced to a man gradually losing his sight and a woman who suddenly loses her voice. In the man’s case, it feels as if he is a portrait of the universal everyman. Slowly losing the world of sight and enduring the human condition of the inevitable yet gradual approach of death are one and the same. During the process of mortality, we struggle against death even as our lives are being consumed. This is akin to speech and silence occurring simultaneously. Human consciousness always coexists with darkness, but our voices are heard most clearly in the blackest darkness. During this battle against mortality, our power of speech becomes ragged, and ultimately the female protagonist loses her voice entirely. I think that she could also be a portrait of us all. This opinion reflects my experience of working on Leave Now, the Wind is Blowing for over four years. At that time I became extremely sensitive to language. Rather than conceptual concerns about language, the sensual act of writing itself became unbearable to me. All the words I was using felt like they had become ragged, which pained me. I overcame most of that torment while writing "Greek Lessons."
Reading Greek Lessons, it’s obvious that the author put much thought and craft into every word chosen — and I can see how another reader might gel precisely with this kind of thing — but it wasn’t quite to my own tastes (or, more unfairly, not to my expectations). I still look forward to reading whatever Kang comes up with next.
