Han Kang

In a classroom in Seoul, a young woman watches her Greek language teacher at the blackboard. She tries to speak but has lost her voice. Her teacher finds himself drawn to the silent woman, for day by day he is losing his sight.

Soon they discover a deeper pain binds them together. For her, in the space of just a few months, she has lost both her mother and the custody battle for her nine-year-old son. For him, it's the pain of growing up between Korea and Germany, being torn between two cultures and languages, and the fear of losing his independence.

Greek Lessons tells the story of two ordinary people brought together at a moment of private anguish—the fading light of a man losing his vision meeting the silence of a woman who has lost her language. Yet these are the very things that draw them to one another. Slowly the two discover a profound sense of unity—their voices intersecting with startling beauty, as they move from darkness to light, from silence to breath and expression.

Greek Lessons is the story of the unlikely bond between this pair and a tender love letter to human intimacy and connection—a novel to awaken the senses, one that vividly conjures the essence of what it means to be alive.

A Novel

Greek Lessons

Lindsay

If only she’d made a map of the route her tears used to take.

If only she’d used a needle to engrave pinpricks, or even just traces of blood, over the route where the words used to flow.

But, she mutters, from a place deeper than tongue and throat, that was too terrible a route.

anastasia

It was around then that I realized for the first time that falling in love is like being haunted. Even before I opened my eyes in the morning, you would slip in under my eyelids. 

Dora Tominic

She'd chosen this place many years ago, on the ground floor so her son could play freely. But he had shown no desire to stamp his feet or run about. When she told him it was okay to use the skipping rope in the living room, he asked, 'But won't it be noisy for the worms and snails?'

louv

She no longer thought in language. She moved without language and understood without language — as it had been before she learned to speak, no, before she obtained life, silence, absorbing the flow of time like balls of cotton, enveloped her body both outside and in.

Scribbled directly below a sentence by Borges, 

The world is an illusion, and living is dreaming

that dream so vivid? How does blood flow and hot tears gush forth?

That when the most frail, tender, forlon parts of us, that is to say our life-breaths, are at some point returned to the world of matter, we will receive nothing in recompense. [...] And that there is no complete thing, ever. At least in this world.

Emiley Jones

If snow is the silence that falls from the sky, perhaps rain is an endless sentence.

To her, there was no touch as instantaneous and intuitive as the gaze. It was close to being the only way of touching without touch.

sina (she/her) 

Why had I been such a fool when it came to loving you? My love for you wasn't foolish, but I was; had my own innate foolishness made love itself foolish? 

The interior of her mouth is as empty as the veins through which the blood no longer flows, it is as empty as a lift shaft where the lift has ceased to operate.

Greek Lessons quotes

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