Greek Lessons, Han Kang, tr. Deborah Smith and Emily Yae Won

I have a strange relationship to Han Kang’s writing. I read The Vegetarian because so many people said it was amazing, and I really didn’t like it very much at all. Then, thinking it might be worth giving her another try, I listened to an audiobook of Human Acts, and thought it was really excellent. Then a friend gave me The White Book, which was of added interest because it’s set in Warsaw, and I… didn’t really like it. So naturally, having a long drive to MLA ahead of me, I checked out Greek Lessons on audiobook. There are so many authors whom I unambiguously love, whose books I have yet to read, and here I am, inexplicably a Han Kang completist.

I think there is something that fascinates me in her novels? I don’t like them, exactly, but I do admire them, somehow. They are so minimalist, and so unabashedly abstract, yet there’s also something insistently and mundanely familiar in the characters. It’s that oscillation between symbolic and literal that intrigues me, I guess — the work of making the stuff of everyday reality into a vehicle for examining aesthetic and philosophical concepts. I was halfway through Greek Lessons and my friend and I were at the Penguin booth in the Book Exhibit and a friend picked up a copy and said “Have you read this? Should I get it?” and I immediately said “Yes!”

That said, I liked the second half far less than the first. The first half is, I think, genuinely interesting — it’s about language, and maybe also about sadness, and solitude? Maybe I like the novels more on audiobook because I can’t follow them as closely, and I am inclined to give them more benefit of the doubt as to the overall design? But there are two central characters, a divorced mother who has lost the ability to speak, and is studying ancient Greek, and her teacher, who has returned to Korea after many years in Germany. In the second half of the book, the attention shifts to the teacher’s increasing loss of sight, and the growing relationship between them, and both of those aspects felt sort of uninterestingly symbolic and predictable.