Greek Lessons - Han Kang

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Her silence and his light!

『Greek Lessons』 is a novel by Han Kang, the first Korean recipient of the Man Booker International Prize. It depicts the moment when the silence of a woman who is losing her speech meets the light of a man who is losing his sight. In the winter of her seventeenth year, the woman loses her speech without any apparent cause or precursor. What made her speak again, after living without words, was a single French word, a foreign language to her. Time passes, and after getting a divorce and losing custody of her child, the woman, who has again lost her speech, chooses Greek, a dead language. There, the Greek instructor and the woman converse haltingly, with silence between them. Meanwhile, the man who left his family in Germany and returned to Korea alone to teach Greek is gradually losing his sight. He carefully watches the woman among his academy students who neither speaks nor smiles, but he feels fear at her resolute silence….

The woman’s profound silence and the man’s faint, diminishing light. This story unfolds as the traces of a woman and a man meet. This novel presents a concise and solid narrative, like a black-and-white photograph completed solely by light and darkness, and like Greek, the oldest existing script on Earth. The author weaves the story with emotions that are neither excessive nor lacking, and with restrained words. One can glimpse a scene where everything—things that existed long ago, their intimations and traces, fleeting moments that seem eternal—all converge in one place.

✨2024 Nobel Prize in Literature awarded to a Korean author for the first time! Han Kang's "Greek Lessons"

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