20/04/2025
Ενα πολυ ενδιαφερον βιβλιο για την δυναμη της σιωπης και την επικοινωνια.
"Greek Lessons" by Han Kang is a luminous, quietly devastating novel that maps the fragile terrain of human connection through silence and fading sight. The celebrated author of The Vegetarian crafts an intimate story of two solitary figures in Seoul: a woman who has inexplicably lost her voice and a Greek language teacher slowly going blind. Their hesitant encounters in a classroom become a meditation on what remains when words dissolve and the visible world retreats.
The woman at the center—once a poet, now severed from speech by some unnameable rupture exists in a world of suspended sound. Her muteness is not medical but existential, a withdrawal from language itself. She enrolls in a Greek class, drawn to the angular shapes of its alphabet, the weight of its untranslated meanings. The teacher, whose deteriorating vision forces him to reconstruct the world through memory and touch, clings to the precision of Greek grammar even as his sight blurs. Their lessons—stumbling through conjugations in the hushed classroom become an unspoken dialogue between different kinds of absence.
Kang's narrative moves between their inner worlds with poetic restraint. The woman's chapters unfold in fragments: the hollow space where her voice should be, the ghost of her former self who once shaped words into poetry, the ache of separation from her young son. The teacher's sections carry the quiet urgency of a man memorizing faces before they disappear completely. Greek, with its ancient layers of meaning, becomes a vessel for what cannot be said directly the teacher's unresolved grief for his estranged father, the woman's guilt over her fractured motherhood. In one scene, she traces the letter theta (θ) on a fogged window, its circular form hovering between her silence and the world outside.
This is a novel about the body's quiet rebellions and the persistence of understanding. Kang, who has always written about physical vulnerability from The Vegetarian's self-destructive protagonist to The White Book's meditation on loss now examines how we communicate when conventional language fails. The woman's muteness mirrors the teacher's encroaching blindness; both are exiled from fundamental ways of engaging with the world, yet in their shared classroom they find tentative points of contact. Even mispronounced Greek words become moments of raw humanity, stumbles that connect rather than distance.
The prose, translated with remarkable sensitivity by Deborah Smith and Emily Yae Won, carries the weight of what goes unspoken. Kang's sentences are spare but luminous, attuned to the textures of silence the way light falls across a notebook page, the pressure of a fingertip against raised lettering. Myth lingers at the edges: the teacher's lectures on Odysseus's wanderings mirror his own displacement; the woman's voicelessness recalls ancient stories of transformation. Yet this is not a novel of grand gestures but of nearly imperceptible shifts the slight tightening of a hand around a pen, the pause before an unvoiced thought.
For readers familiar with Kang's work, Greek Lessons offers a quieter continuation of her enduring concerns: the violence of absence, the resilience of the spirit, the fleeting moments that bridge isolation. It shares the atmospheric depth of The White Book and the psychological intensity of Human Acts, but turns its gaze inward, to the silent spaces between people and the languagespoken, tactile, remembered that might span those distances. In an era of constant noise, Kang's novel stands as a testament to the eloquence of restraint, to the stories that unfold in glances and gestures when words desert us.
BOOK: https://amzn.to/4im694S
