I struggled to engage with the story and the characters, I think mostly because their past experiences and life circumstances are narrated in a very disjointed way, and it wasn't easy to match the pieces and get a complete picture. It was  an overly ambiguous and blurred type of storytelling that didn't work very well, for me at least.

However, I can still appreciate the beautiful writing style. There were many moments when I re-read sentences and reflections just to savour how expertly and poetically they were constructed.

In the end, I think I was more disappointed because I've previously read and absolutely loved other books by Han Kang (namely Human Acts and The White Book) and I started this one with a lot of expectations. 

A Korean woman finds herself without language at the same time that her lecturer slowly loses his eyesight. It's an unusual premise for a novel, but this internationally renowned author somehow makes it not just work but be stunning. 

One day, in the midst of teaching a literature class, a woman finds herself unable to speak; she literally has no words. Scarily this has happened to her before: at age 16, she’d lost language, and though she was taken to a psychiatrist and prescribed medication, she saw no change until a lesson in French—a foreign language—prompted her to utilise speech once again.

This time, unlike before, “the silence that has now returned after a period of twenty years is neither warm, nor dense, nor bright. If that original silence had been similar to that which exists before birth, this new silence is more like that which follows death.”

Of course, the woman has experienced more life events. She has married and divorced; her mother has recently died, and she has lost custody of her son. This aphasia appears to be partially at least stress induced, however much our narrator vehemently denies it.

She begins taking a class in Ancient Greek; perhaps she’ll be able to find language again, as she did as a teenager. But things aren't quite so simple now.

The woman’s story alternates with that of her Greek teacher, who, slowly and steadily losing his sight for almost two decades, is now nearly blind. He, too, was born in Korea but moved to Germany with his family as a child and only returned to his native country and native tongue as an adult.

Both these characters battling their decline in health are achingly alone and feel disconnected from the world around them. Yet, over time, they do find a kind of connection with each other.

The star of the book is Han’s exploration of the limitations of her characters, both linguistic and visual, which makes the novel so profoundly moving. She is meticulous in her descriptive yet beautifully flowing prose, how we often cut ourselves off from the world even as we yearn for the confirmations that connectivity brings.

Greek Lessons is ultimately an emotion stirring exploration of language, memory, and what it is to be human. 4⭐

First, I’d like to extend my gratitude to Netgalley, Random House, and Han Kang for allowing me to read an advance copy of this book in exchange for an honest review!

Greek Lessons is a poignantly abstract exploration of the limits of language and the intimacy of communication. It’s difficult to describe the fascinating quality of how this book plays with its content via its form; it truly feels like every word of the story is a deliberate choice to communicate something different about its themes. The writing itself is almost divine in how it suits the narrative and its characters-- each of the two protagonists has a distinct voice, both with an underlying sense of restraint that presents differently between them. 

Much of the novel is written in flashbacks, but they read as genuine experiences of memory rather than myopic retrospection, and as such the muted grief and nostalgia of the main characters in respect to their pasts drives the arc of the novel rather than straightforward plot beats. This is a slow, heavily character-driven book, and its realistically-flawed characters make it entrancing to follow. The audience forms their image of both protagonists through how they process the world in their respective sections, as well as with how they see each other; that perspective difference, a kind of miscommunication itself, brings emphasis to the themes of belonging, communication, and closeness this novel examines. 

Ultimately, Greek Lessons is a book which understands the power of its language. It tells its story from perspectives which offer unique insight into that power, and does so with graceful, sublime figurativity that slowly evolves into poignant abstraction as it continues. This one definitely merits a reread, or multiple, to absorb and bask in the beauty of its writing. I loved it.