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.
There is a single exception to this solitary life: she signs up for lessons in ancient Greek, recalling that her previous loss of speech had been unexpectedly relieved by learning French, when the single word “Bibliothèque” had summoned sound from “a place deeper than tongue and throat”. Uninterested in the dead language itself, or the literature and philosophy that her teacher – the novel’s second protagonist – patiently attempts to unpack for his ragtag class, she simply hopes that a similar psychic jolt might occur.
If Han’s portrait of a woman’s withdrawal most readily calls to mind her 2015 English-language debut The Vegetarian, whose main character mounts a rebellion against her husband, family and society at large by refusing to eat meat, it also has a clear kinship with her later works Human Acts, which told the story of the Gwangju uprising of 1980, and The White Book, a fragmentary account of a writer walking through Warsaw reflecting on the death of her sister as a newborn. Han’s books often feature a meticulous, sustained attempt to describe inner states of being through glassily clear sentences in which sudden, unexpected images burst through. There is a sense of restraint and violence continually being held in balance; an insistence on indeterminacy, as strands of other narratives weave in and out of the story we believe we are being told.
Here, the silent woman’s story is complemented by that of her teacher, who is gradually going blind and has returned to Seoul after a long period of living in Germany. Episodes from his past introduce a number of other characters whose stories remain only tangential, partially glimpsed, and which suggest estrangements, early deaths, physical and emotional displacement. But the teacher contrasts powerfully with his silent counterpart; as he loses his footing in the world – at one point, literally tumbling down a stairwell – he clings to and cherishes each moment of vision that remains to him, even as he begins to develop the resilience to accept its imminent departure.
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, as the teacher speculates, before conceding that there is “something tenuous and unsatisfactory” in the way even attempting that balancing act works, “sifting all humankind’s sufferings and regrets, attachments, sadness, and weaknesses through the loose net of truth and falsity to obtain a handful of premises like a handful of gold dust”.
The contrast between the two characters also brings into play the question of agency, a theme underpinned by the novel’s interest in ancient Greek’s middle voice, which is distinct from the active and the passive, and can express in condensed fashion how a subject is affected by another’s actions or a change in circumstances. By the close of Greek Lessons, both characters have indeed been affected by one another; by their interaction with their own memories, sensations and thoughts; by the passage of time and by the expression and non-expression of language. This process works similarly on the reader, who is affected by the narrative while never quite feeling as though they have a sufficient grasp of it; instead, it appears both elusive and allusive – but never quite conclusive. And yet 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.
• Greek Lessons by Han Kang, translated by Deborah Smith and Emily Yae Won, is published by Hamish Hamilton (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
