Greek Lessons by Han Kang – Learning a Language

Greek Lessons is a novel by the Korean author Han Kang, who won the 2024 Nobel Prize for Literature. It’s about a woman who can’t speak, developing a relationship with the tutor of her Ancient Greek class, who is losing his eyesight.

This is a book about the contradictory development of language.

If that sounds abstruse as a topic, then I would agree.

There’s one chapter which opens with two Ancient Greek words which look almost identical on the page. Forgive me if I don’t reproduce them, but my keyboard doesn’t stretch that far. I’ll just quote the comment that follows them:

‘These two verbs mean ‘to suffer’ and ‘to learn’. Do you see how they’re almost identical? What Socrates is doing here is punning on these words to remark on the similarity of the two actions.’

Does learning necessarily involve suffering? Well, to an extent the answer is yes. It does take some effort and discipline to learn anything. There are occasions, however, when you can learn without too much pain, maybe even enjoy the process. This sort of learning is a less visible achievement, and is less likely to win a Nobel Prize. Maybe that’s why P.G. Wodehouse never won a Nobel Prize. Maybe that’s why comedies rarely win Oscars, though it would be hard to argue that the best comedies are not deserving of such an honour, or that comedy does not have lessons for us.

Greek Lessons was very interesting, and I’ve thought about the book a lot after reading it. The way language evolves, from pictograms, becoming sophisticated, moving into bewildering abstraction, leaving behind the experience it was meant to be communicating, and then evolving seemingly backwards in a simpler direction. The book has a rarified quality about it, and more down to earth moments, as language circles around from naivety to complexity and back again. But while I admired all that, overall I have to admit finding the book fairly hard work to read. My personal feeling is that a book like this reveals much about how we view achievement in literature. To be good it has to teach us something, and to teach us something it has to be hard work. Is that how literature should be? I don’t know. But my feeling is that it’s just as much an achievement to create something that seems like fun but is quietly teaching you things anyway. Novels developed as a diversion and an entertainment, and that flaky, showbiz history has to be part of their work, even when people study novels at university. It’s that grey area between goofing off and getting it together that somehow gives the novel as a form its particular fascination. And in a sense that’s the grey area that Greek Lessons explores as it follows language from simple to fancy and back again. Maybe in the case of Greek Lessons the work was a bit too overt. But don’t let a slacker like me put you off. Greek Lessons is an interesting book and worth reading.