Greek Lessons

In a classroom in Seoul, a woman who has lost the power of speech for the second time in her life enrolls in lessons in ancient Greek, a dead language she chooses precisely because it asks nothing of her voice. Her teacher, a man who emigrated to Germany as a child and has returned to Korea, is slowly losing his sight. In alternating chapters that braid the present with memory, the two move toward a tentative understanding built not on conversation but on shared loss, attention, and the spaces between words. Han Kang tells the story in spare, luminous fragments, building a plot-light meditation on language, silence, grief, and the fragile work of reaching another person when speech and sight are failing.