On reading Han Kang

 

I woke this morning in the midst of a dream about Korea.  I spent a year there years ago straight out of High School, back when a war was going on and South Korea wasn't at all as sophisticated as it is in Kang's day.  I got half way through Greek Lessons before falling asleep.  I knew soft-spoken Koreans like the two main characters, but Kang doesn't imply this is a current national characteristics and provides an adequate number of nasty personalities to contrast with the main ones.

The woman is abandoned and divorced after which her husband obtains custody of their young son.  The woman loses her ability to speak and so has no hope of being able to regain her son.  She had an episode of this as a young girl.  Hopefully she'll eventually regain her ability to speak, but it doesn't happen during the novel, at least no more than a promising squeak at the end.

Ultimately worse is the teacher of Greek.  He has a genetic condition causing him to slowly lose his eye-sight.  He is mostly blind during the early part of the novel, but Greek is something he can teach from memory; so neither his students nor school administrators know.

The two characters progress mostly separately until the woman tries to rescue a small bird in the mostly empty school building. The professor tries to see what she has cornered, stumbles, breaks his glasses and is rendered helpless.  The woman can't speak but she can write a word in the palm of his hand and manages to get him back to his apartment.  She sits with him as he talks. Eventually she leaves but comes back the next day.  He senses she is again there with him.  She intends to take him to get new glasses.  Emotions run high, and these work in her such that by the end of the novel we know her ability to speak will return. The woman and the Greek teacher are obviously together now, and if she can once again speak, we assume, they will be able to function adequately in the future.

My dry narrative doesn't do justice to the poetry of this short novel.  I should read it again, but not right now.  I don't want to tire my eyes because my son will arrive later to take me to Lens Crafter to be fitted for new glasses -- something scheduled long before Kang won the Novel Prize.

And with only my dog Jessica to speak to on most days, my ability to speak has deteriorated, but only to the extent that I typically sound foolish when I do speak.

In retrospect, I doubt that anyone familiar with Kang's published work would recommend Greek Lessons as a good place to start.  The Vegetarian, which won the Booker Prize is apparently more reasonable, but readers of this novel, report being reminded of Kafka's writings.  I read a lot of Kafka years ago and resolved never to reread him.  Nevertheless, with some reluctance, I just now downloaded the Kindle edition of The Vegetarian.