From where I sit, Kang is one of the most unconventional, perceptive and truly innovative writers publishing today ... Like all of her books, it’s preoccupied with deprivation and loss, and the effect both can have on the spirit ... The novel’s true power lies not in its plot, but in its prose ... Kang riddles the text with evocative descriptions that simultaneously illuminate and reflect ... Compared to Kang’s other books, Greek Lessons is a less straightforward read. Its majesty may not become fully apparent on the first go ... Her prose hits its mark.
Han Kang espouses a[n]...affinity for these territories of syntax and meaning; she also excels at capturing the ways in which they can be lonely and inaccessible ... The book is told in alternating perspectives, and the student’s chapters are written at a remove, in the third person. They reveal in subtle scenes of recollection and routine a heartsick person trying to access expression again, without her voice ... Han is at her best when focusing on the physicality of language, and readers of her previous work, most notably her acclaimed novel The Vegetarian, will recognize her flair for depicting a kind of voluptuous disgust ... The prose Han deploys, at once evocative and elliptical, complements her characters’ inner torment and alienation. There is a sense of inevitability when at last the protagonists begin, touchingly, to communicate with one another ... Demonstrates the breadth of Han’s writing style ... A silence spreads, at once captivating and distancing.
Tender...translated with lyrical precision by Deborah Smith and Emily Yae Won ... Affecting ... Suffused with crackling sensory imagery that emphasizes our ties to the world ... Whether Han's novel will endure as long is anyone's guess, but readers will surely gain fresh insight from Greek Lessons each time they pick it up.
While Han’s other three translated books are governed by failures of communication, this novel gives language a much more active role ... Resists...streamlined reading ... Woman, man, and language come together at last, leaving the reader with a sense of the hard-won beauty and tenuousness of communication.
The juxtaposition of these two characters, with their respective sensory challenges, isn’t particularly nuanced ... As counterpoints to the flashbacks, Han injects fascinating insights on Hangul, the alphabet system used for writing the Korean language, and how it differs from the syntax of ancient Greek, and from German, which the teacher learned in childhood. This is a novel, above all, for readers drawn to considering language itself as a source of self-revelation ... To my ear, with no knowledge of Korean, the collaboration did not noticeably alter the cadence of Han’s voice in English. Yet something about that voice seems less certain in this book, less trusting of its ability to convey subtext. Some refrains about snow repeat a bit too often ... In addition to her incisive writing about bodily responses to language, Greek Lessons contains some exceptionally poignant scenes about a mother’s growing estrangement from her child ... This novel is a celebration of the ineffable trust to be found in sharing language, whether between parent and child, teacher and student, or between words spoken aloud and those traced, painstakingly, with a finger on someone else’s waiting palm.
If this makes Greek Lessons sound a little like a morality tale, it is more accurately pictured – as references to Plato and Socrates suggest – as a philosophical examination of selfhood and contingency. It considers the problem of what is gained when something is lost ... Han has assembled a striking montage of the ways in which our connection with what lies within and beyond us is fragile but, if we choose it to be, no less precious for that.
An extraordinary and dense novel that offers up new depths on each reading. It is short – 160 pages – which means you can read and reread it in a day if you want to. I have a soft spot for short novels – their intensity, their skill in delivering something sharp and true in a few breaths – but the bias is irrelevant because it does what all good novels do: it invites the reader into a world that reaches well beyond the confines of its pages ... The original was published in Korean in 2011 and it’s a happy coincidence that what’s inevitably lost in translation – something always is – seems to underline the dissolution and transience of language (and lives) that Kang is exploring. In many ways, the language is poetic – metaphor is second nature to her; she manages to excavate ideas with very few words – and it’s not surprising to learn that Kang started out her publishing life as a poet ... Thank goodness Han Kang’s literary voice takes up space in the world in the way her female characters struggle to.
It’s a touching relationship—the teacher, who narrates half the novel, is especially sympathetic—but also a thickly symbolic one, and there is a tendency toward obvious melodrama throughout this book. The existential pain that was left fairly mysterious in The Vegetarian is here spelled out in overripe flourishes ... The result is something like a bel canto opera pitched at a whisper: a lot of writhing and grimacing but not much music.
Her alienated perspective can be relentless at times, like a recurring nightmare in which you keep walking down the same narrow hallways, retracing your steps and making no progress ... Concerned with how people can communicate when options are taken away from them, and how vulnerability can open the door ... Kang’s latest isn’t a page-turner, and reading it can feel like being suspended in time, or sitting through a very long class, despite the book’s slimness. But that’s the effect of writing into discomfort ... Kang reaches beyond the usual senses to translate the unspeakable.
Many extraordinary passages ... The sensual, botanical and earthbound register of The Vegetarian contrasts with Greek Lessons as summer does winter: the latter is a crystalline, cerebral work of an icier temperature ... While her characters’ transformations can sound formulaic in description, her beautiful writing delineates complex shifts in consciousness ... It is touch that brings about the novel’s late thawing, and which offers a way out of its frozen universe, where words are characterized like falling ribbons of dark water.
Greek Lessons will feel like a departure from Kang's previous English-translated novels. It's an intimate and vulnerable portrayal of two lonely, middle-aged characters who can't help but gravitate toward each other. The reading experience is like that of watching a quiet indie film that tugs little by little at your heartstrings until you're rendered speechless with both sadness and hope by the final pages ... Their wordless interplay recalls the longing glances of Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung in Wong Kar-wai's contemporary classic film In the Mood for Love ... Though Greek Lessons might be different from Kang's bolder and horror-tinged works, the novel's hopeful and humane belief in the redemptive power of love might just be what our society needs.
Fans of Han Kang’s International Booker prize-winning novel The Vegetarian will recognise some themes here. In that novel, too, the female protagonist turns mute, stifled by a patriarchal society, an abusive family and a miserable marriage ... Kang is a poet, and her language can be beautiful and surprising ... But there is a lack of lightness, not only of mood...but sometimes also of touch. It feels unnatural and contrived that the two lead characters lack speech and sight ... While the translation may be more faithful to the original, Greek Lessons is a less interesting book by far. Perhaps Smith should have jazzed it up a bit.
Nothing much happens in Han Kang’s novel Greek Lessons, but the author’s artistry is such that you keep on reading, whether for the beautiful writing or for the beautiful pain of the strange couple at the story’s core ... Beautifully translated ... Though the woman and her teacher are full of sorrow, their sadness doesn’t stop them from appreciating and even seeking small moments of beauty. This gives Kang’s slender book much of its power.
While the relationship between the two protagonists is moving, and the novel touches on some important themes regarding language and communication, the drama is pitched at a low level of intensity, and it lacks the appealing strangeness of The Vegetarian. The result is more smoke than fire.
Han has built an enviable career providing exquisite, intimate space for damaged, lost souls. Her Booker-sharing translator, the lauded Deborah Smith, has gifted three of Han’s English-rendered titles to Anglophone audiences; she returns here for a fourth seamless collaboration ... What might originally read like a bifurcated narrative deftly intertwines into a haunting exploration of tentative possibilities and yearned-for connections.
Delicate ... This brilliant, shimmering work is never at a loss for words even when exploring the mind of a woman who won’t speak, and its pursuit of an authentic, exquisite new form is profound. Once again, Kang demonstrates great visionary power.
[Han's] latest novel is another stunning gem: quiet, sharply faceted, and devastating ... It’s Han’s exploration of their limitations—both linguistic and visual—that makes the novel so deeply moving. On page after page, she describes ever so meticulously the ways we are cut off from the world even as we yearn for it. A stunning exploration of language, memory, and beauty from an internationally renowned writer.
