November 1, 2022
A teacher of Greek in Seoul and one of his students are bound together by sadness. She can no longer speak, having lost both her mother and custody of her nine-year-old son, while he is losing his eyesight and possibly his independence even as he struggles with having grown up between the cultures of the two countries, Korea and Germany, where he was raised. From the author of the International Booker Prize--winning The Vegetarian.
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Starred review from February 13, 2023
Booker winner Kang (The Vegetarian) explores the borders of the senses in this delicate love story. An unnamed Korean woman living in Seoul stops speaking after her mother dies and she loses custody of her eight-year-old son. An interest in language, though, continues to tug at her, and she enrolls in a Greek class. There, she begins writing poetry that catches the eye of her instructor who, unbeknownst to anyone else, is slowly losing his sight. Split between his dual homelands of Korea and Germany, the instructor picks up on the student’s search for a language beyond what can be expressed or seen with the naked eye, something the woman gestures at in her poetry: “a language as cold and hard as a pillar of ice.” In prose that merges memory, story, and poetry, Kang tracks how the two find in one another what is missing from the sensual world. This brilliant, shimmering work is never at a loss for words even when exploring the mind of a woman who won’t speak, and its pursuit of an authentic, exquisite new form is profound. Once again, Kang demonstrates great visionary power.
Starred review from February 15, 2023
A woman finds herself without language at the same time that her instructor slowly loses his eyesight. One day, in the midst of teaching a literature class, a woman finds herself unable to speak. She quite literally has no words. This has happened to her before: At 16, she'd lost language, and though she was taken to a psychiatrist and prescribed medication, she saw no change until a lesson in French--a foreign language--prompted her to regain speech. Now, things have become more complicated. "Unlike before," Han writes, "the silence that has now returned after a period of twenty years is neither warm, nor dense, nor bright. If that original silence had been similar to that which exists before birth, this new silence is more like that which follows death." Now the woman has been married and divorced; her mother has recently died; and she has lost custody of her son. She begins taking a class in Ancient Greek; perhaps she'll be able to find language again, as she did as a teenager. Han is the author of The Vegetarian (2016), and her latest novel is another stunning gem: quiet, sharply faceted, and devastating. The woman's story alternates with that of her Greek teacher, who has been slowly and steadily losing his sight for almost two decades. Now he is nearly blind. Born in Korea, he'd moved to Germany with his family as a child and only returned to his native country--and his native language--as an adult. Both characters are achingly alone, disconnected, in their own ways, from the world. Eventually, gradually, they do find a kind of connection with each other. But it's Han's exploration of their limitations--both linguistic and visual--that makes the novel so deeply moving. On page after page, she describes ever so meticulously the ways we are cut off from the world even as we yearn for it. A stunning exploration of language, memory, and beauty from an internationally renowned writer.
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Starred review from March 1, 2023
Man Booker International Prize-winning Han has built an enviable career providing exquisite, intimate space for damaged, lost souls. Her Booker-sharing translator, the lauded Deborah Smith, has gifted three of Han's English-rendered titles to Anglophone audiences; she returns here for a fourth seamless collaboration, this time with Canada-born, Korea-based Emily Yae Won. Originally published in Korea in 2011 as 희랍어 시간 (Huilabeo Sigan, literally "Greek Time"), Han's newest import remains empathically timeless, a potential-love-story-in-progress that is another intimate, lingering meditation on identity and autonomy. Her story is initially voiceless--presented at a distance in third person--revealing a woman who escaped an abusive marriage, only at the cost of losing custody of her eight-year-old son and then facing her own mother's death a month later. His story--written in first person as if he's striving for independence--is mostly epistolary as he examines his pixilated past involving both emotional and literal blindness as a Korean immigrant to Germany who returns to Korea to teach Greek (!) in a Seoul language academy. Han's signature elliptical, incisive writing first introduces ""she"" and ""he"" as separate loners, each struggling in isolation. What might originally read like a bifurcated narrative deftly intertwines into a haunting exploration of tentative possibilities and yearned-for connections.
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