One of the two central protagonists of Han Kang’s Greek Lessons, the 2011 novel from the International Booker prizewinner, which has just been translated from Korean into English, has lost the power of speech. The book explores the extent to which this sudden disappearance of words, which first befell the unnamed woman when she was a teenager and has now recurred at a particularly vulnerable moment in her life, amounts to a more catastrophic rupture with language. For the woman appears almost to repudiate any other ways of communicating, eschewing written notes to her therapist or attempts to convey information through sign language.
Almost from the start the reader suspects that the woman’s silence represents a more profound alienation from meaning or, perhaps, a sense of being overwhelmed that might be traced back to her childhood, when the letters and phonemes that fascinated her simultaneously threatened to “thrust their way into her sleep like skewers”. As a mute teenager, she learned to exist beyond language, “absorbing the flow of time like balls of cotton”; now, recently bereaved by the death of her mother and by the loss of custody of her son following a divorce, she retreats again, into the featureless privacy of her apartment by day and the streets by night, attempting to exhaust herself enough to sleep.
