3 ½ stars

“The lit fuse of the chilly explosive primed in her heart is no more. The interior of her mouth is as empty as the veins through which the blood no longer flows, it is as empty as a lift shaft where the lift has ceased to operate.”


In a clinically detached prose Han Kang examines in exacting detail the experiences of two individuals whose ability to perceive the world and be able to express themselves, to interact with others, are impaired. Preoccupied with the notion and the reality of communication, perception, language, and sight these characters feel increasingly alienated from their everyday reality, unsure of themselves, their senses, and their bodies, and attempting to find a new way to occupy space, of navigating their world, by, in the case of the woman, distancing herself from that which was familiar, and, in the case of the man, retreating inward to recollect the past and to understand the origins and effects of his linguistic and cultural disconnect.
Unsparing and analytical, Greek Lessons is permeated by ambivalence. This atmosphere of unease and the characters’ aloofness succeed in making us feel a sense of estrangement from the text, which is compounded by the prose’s impersonal way of addressing the characters and how events that should carry some emotional impact are delivered and/or recounted in a distinctly dispassionate way. Kang places her characters under a microscope, zeroing in on momentary discomforts and sensations, be it a character’s dry lips or quivering eyelids. These close-ups are often uncomfortable, but they do succeed in conveying with precision the characters’ experiences. These coldly anatomical descriptions interrupt the characters’ introspections, which often amount to a lot of navel-gazing. Their preoccupation with the function and reality of a language, of linguistic barriers, of bilingualism, of ‘dead’ languages, of the way language and communication are necessary to navigate many spaces, and without it, one can find themselves on the margins, a passive spectator. The woman’s difficulties in conveying and articulating her thoughts and feelings definitely resonated with me. She is unwilling or avoids explaining her ‘loss’ of language, and there was something like resilience in her silence, in her choice to remain opaque. 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. Here of course the circumstances of the woman are quite different, soon after the death of her mother the woman loses a drawn-out custody battle over her eight-year-old son. Severed from her son, grieving the loss of her mother, the woman, a professor, falls once again victim to a ‘malady’ that results in a loss of speech.

“Before she lost words—when she was still able to use them to write—she sometimes wished that her own expressions would more closely resemble inarticulacy: a moan or low cry. The sound of suffering through bated breath. Snarling. Humming in one’s half-sleep to pacify a child. Stifled laughter. The sound of two people’s lips pressing together, pulling apart.”


Yet, her loss of language cannot be easily ascribed to these losses. Feeling disconnected from Korean, the woman attempts to approach the language anew. To do so, she distances herself from her mother tongue and chooses to study a dead language, ancient Greek. These classes are taught by a man who grew up between Korea and Germany, and because of this has long felt not only a linguistic divide but a self-divide, perpetually longing to belong, to feel at ease. For years he has been gradually losing his sight, and so he finds himself questioning how he can retain independence, observing the world around him with regret and yearning. He writes letters to his sister, recounting his childhood experiences, from the shock of moving from Korea to Germany to the pressure to ‘assimilate’, and he also reflects on past friendships and loves.

“Even the occasional memorable event is soon erased without a trace under time’s huge, opaque mass.”


By switching between these two individuals Kang draws a parallel between their experiences and realities, as they both find themselves having to reevaluate new ways of perceiving and communicating with the world around them. There is, towards the end, a moment of kinship between the two, that felt startlingly poignant.

“Sunspots explode, without a sound, in the distance. Hearts and lips touch across a fault line, at once joined and eternally sundered.”


The narrative expounds on these two individuals' theoretical and personal ruminations, mirroring and juxtaposing their experiences and perspectives. Their reflections on languages, spoken and unspoken ways of communication, expression and perception, memory, grief, and the body (the way they fail and change us), are rendered all the more lucid by the author’s unsparing style. Yet, despite how clinical and ascetic her style was, there are moments where Kang’s prose is elevated by an elegiac, lyrical even, use of language.

“If only she’d made a map of the route her tears used to take.”


Greek Lessons makes for a fascinating read. The two central characters remain slightly outside of our reach, despite the time we spend alongside them. The subject matter and language itself are the core of this novel, making it sure, intellectually and stylistically arresting but, except for a few moments, I felt not only at a remove but as if I was reading a textbook. I couldn't help but compare this unfavourably to two favorites of mine, Whereabouts and All the Lovers in the Night (both novels also explore loneliness in women who assume the role of observer). Nevertheless, I do admire what Kang achieves in Greek Lessons and I found the ending to be quite rewarding.

First off this translation is incredible as it flits between two characters & three perspectives and feels seamless.

A young woman is unable to speak, an affliction she first had in childhood, after a traumatic few months. She attends Greek classes where the teacher, a man of the same age, is losing his sight. this is very beautiful & evocative but god, just an undercurrent of desperate sadness.

Thanks to NetGalley and Viking for the opportunity to review this book!

As The Vegetarian deals with a woman slowly being ostracised from her family and even society after choosing to remove meat from her diet, Greek Lessons deals with two characters facing their own forms of loneliness and removal from the world: this time in the forms of blindless and losing one's voice.

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. Most of the book is quite abstract. The Greek professor's parts are in first and second person, recounting time in Germany, addressing an old friend/lover. The woman's parts delve into an ex-husband, a child no longer under her care. In the final third or so of the book the two characters properly come together in a long scene involving a trapped bird. Kang writes poetically but simply. One gets the impression that a lot is going on behind every sentence, every scene. By the end though I found the story of the blind man and the mute coming together fairly inconsequential. The exploring of the Greek language and letters was interesting, bits of Plato, etc., and helped the theme of communication and language, which the novel is above all else, about. A strange lonely sort of book. Thanks to Penguin for the advance copy for review.

This was quite a change! I had read the Vegetarian and loved it, but I found Greek Lessons somewhat confusing, essentially because the POV in each chapter is not very clear.

My thanks to the publisher for an ARC of this book via NetGalley. This is the third of Han Kang’s books that I have read, the other two being The Vegetarian and The White Book. I thought The Vegetarian was dark and quite disturbing. I was blown away by The White Book.

This new book sits somewhere between the two in terms of my reading experience. I say “new”, but it’s actually the translation that is new with the Korean original having been published over 10 years ago.

Greek Lessons is focused on two different characters, a lecturer and a student, whose lives intersect at the titular Greek lessons. For much of the novel, the lives of the two protagonists unfold in separate threads of the book. This seems appropriate given that isolation and separation are strong themes in the book. The lecturer sections are presented in the first person - he is back in Korea after a period in Germany and is gradually losing his eyesight. In his sections he remembers a girl he knew in Germany who was deaf. The student sections are related in the third person, a woman who has recently lost custody of her son and whose reaction to this and the loss of her mother is to stop speaking, something she had also done for a period earlier in her life.

As with The White Book, some of the writing is beautiful and poetic. It feels very careful, very precise. There are images and phrases that repeat across the book.

There is a lot to admire here. But I confess that I never really connected with the book. There is quite a lot about Ancient Greek and about philosophy and Plato. Maybe I needed to be more aware of these areas to get more involved in the narrative. As it is, I spent far too much time trying to work out how the Greek in the book matched its translation, because if often didn’t seem to (I studied Ancient Greek for a while a long, long time ago, so this wasn’t from a completely standing start and my failure just indicates how much I have forgotten in the intervening decades).

In the end, I felt the characters in the book were there to provide the metaphors the author intended to explore and that makes the whole thing feel a bit artificial.

But that’s just my personal reaction. And there is a lot of beauty in the prose here to be admired.

While not without its charm, this little book sometimes proved difficult to know who is talking. There's a mute girl and a blind man and I could not distinguish one from the other for ages. I studied Greek in university so thought I'd enjoy this more. You see some of the trademark floral language and mood evoking pacing but overall, this wasn't all that interesting.

Having read The Vegetarian I thought I'd be in for a treat. That was a solid 5 star review. In some ways, I'm glad this was written before The Vegetarian as it proves it's not a decline in Han Kang's writing, rather it improved with time.

Greek Lessons is a short, somewhat elegiac novel about language and sight, and how they impact our state of being. It's as dense and literary as you'd imagine a Han Kang story to be, although it's perhaps not quite as pithy as some of her previous works. There is some wonderful imagery, and despite there not being all that much plot there are some captivating mise en scène studded throughout.

A thoughtful and thought-provoking little book.

I haven't read anything from this author before so I'm coming into this with fresh eyes. I think Han Kang's writing is wonderfully bittersweet with tender sombreness laced throughout. There's a very endearing relationship between a mute woman and a blind man who's connection goes deeper as they discover how to communicate. It feels contemporary whilst giving nods to nostalgia and I can't wait to see what comes next from this author.

Knowing there are more books coming from Han Kang makes me immensely happy. She's a favorite of mine and her Human Acts is one of the best books I have ever read. As always Greek Lessons is written beautifully, with a tenderness you could see in her other works as well. It is about having a voice, connection with each other.

This 2011 Korean language novel by Han Kang has been translated into English by Deborah Smith and Emily Yae Won. The former translated Han Kang’s previous “Vegetarian” (which won the 2016 International Booker prize), “Human Acts” and 2016 “The White Book” (shortlisted in 2018) – originally published in Korean in 2007, 2014 and 2016 respectively.

It is I think perhaps a little less distinctive than those: the rather disturbing, visceral and sexual trilogy of novellas in “The Vegetarian”, the disturbing political multi-narrative of “Human Acts” and the poignant autobiographical beauty of the essays (and white space) in “The White Book” – albeit I think perhaps similar in tone (but definitely not form) to the latter – and certainly much more in a melancholic register than the former two. When I say it is less distinctive than her other translated works - I read this immediately after Deborah Levy’s next novel “August Blue” and I could see some similarities between the two writers’ approaches and I also saw resonances with Jessica Au’s “Cold Enough for Snow”.

Around the time of the English translation of “The Vegetarian” the author gave some interviews in which she discussed this more recent work, in I think implicit contrast

"I think this novel is the sunniest of which I am capable. I didn't purposefully write it in a positive or heartwarming way. Instead, I found that the story headed toward the light on its own while I was writing it. I realized that I was approaching the light, too. I couldn't tell on my own whether human warmth was indeed warm; there were parts that were so tender and primeval that I couldn't gauge their tenderness on my own. That's how I knew I was getting close. Approaching these areas required me as a writer to remain invisible. As the characters continued to overcome suffering, the novel gradually became more transparent. This was a strange and unforgettable experience for me."

Where perhaps the novel is similar is in that it features a female protagonist rejecting violence – here one that that “rejects speech as a way of rejecting the violence which saturates language”.

The book has two main protagonists who encounter each other in the eponymous classes at an adult educational institute in Korea, but whose stories largely unfold separately during the novel – with both protagonists rather sealed up in their own worlds – but which intersect in a moving finale where the two do form some kind of human connection against the odds.

The first party sections are by the Greek language teacher – as a 15-year-old boy he moved with his family to Frankfurt in Germany for some 17 years, and now back in his home country Korea seems slightly stranded between the two cultures and languages, as well as increasingly affected by a degenerative, paternally inherited eyesight problem which is likely to make him blind by 40. He is also haunted by the memory of a girl he knew in Germany – the daughter of his eye Doctor, who herself suffered a childhood illness leading to her own internal barrier condition of deafness.

The third-party sections are about one of his small group of students. The woman has recently lost both her mother and the custody of her son (whose father is planning to take him abroad). She has a very complex relationship with language. First of all as a child memorising Hangul – she gains a profound understanding of the consonants and vowels that make them up at six and a particularly obsession with the characters for Woods “in which pronunciation, meaning and form were all wrapped around stillness”. But overtime she struggles with the violence of language and at 16 suddenly moved into a world without language, before somehow reacquainting herself with it following the discovery of the French word bibliotheque. Now, perhaps due to her losses, the silence has returned some twenty years later (albeit in a form closer to death – note that her loss of language and the teacher’s loss of sight are both metaphors for the universal ageing process and human mortality) and she hopes the Ancient Greek classes might help her reclaim language again.

And as the two explore what has bought them to this place, there is frequent precisely crafted writing, for example ....


"Do you ever wonder at the strangeness of it?
That our bodies have eyelids and lips,
that they can at times be made to close from the outside, and at other times to lock fast from within."

There are also Levy style recurring striking imagery/tableaux – including two symmetrical pieces of historical violence (an assault with a piece of wood and a vicious bite) rendered onto each of the protagonists in bewilderment and hurt by those they dearly loved but subsequently lost.

The book I think would benefit from a greater interest in the Philosophy of Plato, and greater knowledge of Ancient Greek (for example the middle voice “which expresses an action that relates to the subject reflexively” – which was actually the genesis of the novel) or Korean Hangul than I possess.

I also think that, and this is also where the Levy comparison comes in more negatively, the narrative and characters are perhaps rather too much of metaphorical devices and their dialogue too artificial (although perhaps it could also be said Socratic).

Nevertheless, another excellent book from a great author and translator(s) team

This is a beautifully tender piece of writing but it doesn't have the glorious strangeness, richness intensity of Kang's The Vegetarian.

Shuttling between two protagonists, a woman who is no longer speaking and the 1st person narrative from her Greek teacher who is losing his sight, this thinks about issues of intimacy and connection, about the roles of language and the senses in forging relationships between people.

The thematics reminded me a little of Katie Kitamura's Intimacies though the question of linguistics was more centred there - but there is an interest in communication and misunderstandings in both books.

Kang's prose in this (translated, of course) feels more placid than I expected and while she trades in some lovely imagery, there is a slight feel of a lack of personality, possibly due to the style of modern international translation which has a kind of 'voice' of its own.

It's a quick read, an intelligent and, at times, moving one - but it didn't wow me or trouble me the way The Vegetarian did. 3.5 stars.