Greek Lessons - Han Kang
A review of Han Kang’s novel resisting narrative resolution in favour of silence, proximity and incompleteness.
149 pages · Paperback · Penguin Books Ltd, February 2024 · Translated by Deborah Smith and E. Yaewon
Superb Writing, Withheld Story
Greek Lessons reads like a novel written against narrative habit.
What makes it demanding is not obscurity or density, but its distance from familiar rewards. Plot escalation, emotional release, and the comfort of a complete story are absent. Instead, the book asks the reader to remain with states that do not resolve: silence that does not break, vision that does not return, connection that does not redeem.
The slowness feels structural rather than stylistic. Each chapter narrows rather than expands. Meaning accumulates sideways. Past and present run in parallel without converging into explanation. Nothing is confusing, yet little is concluded.
The writing itself is superb. Controlled, exact, and quietly confident, it never reaches for effect yet carries sustained emotional pressure.
Reading alongside the audiobook does not speed this up. If anything, the measured delivery reinforces the book’s resistance to momentum. Listening becomes another form of staying rather than moving on.
What stands out is how little the novel tries to persuade. Trauma is neither dramatised nor softened. Two diminished inner lives are placed near one another, and proximity is allowed to suffice.
This was my final Han Kang. Seen in that context, the book feels like a closing gesture rather than a statement piece. Quieter, narrower, less forceful than her major works, yet assured.
I liked it for that reason. Not for completion or resolution, but for its faith in incompleteness as a truthful shape.