Musings of a reading addict

Keywords: Greek Lessons review Han Kang, Han Kang Greek Lessons critique, deafness vs mutism, aphasia explained, language and silence in literature, critical literary fiction review, 2026 books about linguistics, fiction representation of disability in novels

Genre: Literary Fiction

Length: short medium long

Country: South Korea

Synopsis (from Goodreads)

“Now and then, language would thrust its way into her sleep like a skewer through meat, startling her awake several times a night.”

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 the two 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 each other. 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.

Review (it’s a long one)

I picked up Greek Lessons by Han Kang with a mix of curiosity and hesitation. I’ve circled her work before (Human Acts, The White Book) drawn in by the titles, yet never quite convinced to commit. A book event finally tipped the scale: the novel was presented as poetic, yes, but also dynamic, layered, alive. That was enough to make me try.

And I did try to like this book. I really did.

But somewhere along the way, it started to feel less like I was reading something meaningful and more like I was being told that it must be meaningful—and that the failure to connect was somehow mine to fix.

At its core, Greek Lessons follows two characters: a woman who stops speaking, and a Greek teacher who is gradually losing his sight. The premise sounds compelling, especially if you’re interested in language, silence, and the limits of expression. And I am, deeply. I speak multiple languages, I’m fascinated by linguistics, by untranslatable words, by the way meaning shifts across structures. This should have been exactly my kind of book.

And yet, it felt underused. The ideas are there, but they’re never pushed far enough to become truly illuminating.

Instead, the novel leans heavily into a kind of introspective suffering that I personally struggle with, not just here, but in a lot of contemporary literature. There is a tendency to overanalyze pain, to pathologize every human experience, to dig so deeply into the psyche that clarity is lost. I’ve seen this in Western fiction as well, and yes, hate me if you want for this, I’ve already been there, but A Little Life is the clearest example that comes to mind. For me, that kind of writing crosses the line from depth into emotional manipulation.

“The sadness of the human body. The human body, with its many indented, tender, vulnerable parts. I realized something with armpits. The chest.The groin. A body born to embrace someone, to desire to embrace someone.
I should have embraced you as hard as I could, at least once before that period of our lives passed us by.
It wouldn’t have hurt or harmed me to do so.
I would have withstood it, survived it.”

Life is difficult. That is not a revelation.

If I gathered all of you reading this into one room right now and asked: who here has had at least one painful experience in childhood? Who here has lost someone they loved? Who here has gone through something that left a mark?—I doubt the room would stay silent. These things are not rare. They are the baseline of being human. Which is why I struggle when novels present suffering as if it were a unique discovery that only they can articulate.

What made me want to write this review, however, is not just that I didn’t enjoy the book—but that both the novel and many of its readers seem to misunderstand, or at least blur, some very real conditions related to speech and hearing.

And this is where I can’t stay quiet.

As a special education teacher working also with deaf and hard-of-hearing students, and as someone trained in speech and communication therapy, I feel the need to clarify a few things—because words like deafness, muteness, and aphasia are not interchangeable.

A teeny tiny “lesson” in Speech and Communication Pathology

Before going any further, I want to be clear, especially for fellow speech therapists, medical professionals, or special education teachers who might be reading this, this is not meant to be a clinical breakdown of speech and language disorders. I’m not attempting to cover the full scope, terminology, or nuance that these topics deserve in a professional setting. My intention here is much simpler: to offer a few baseline distinctions so that readers don’t conflate fundamentally different conditions. If this encourages even a small shift toward more accurate understanding when approaching this book, or any book dealing with communication, silence, or disability, then it has done its job.

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A deaf person is someone who cannot hear. That’s it. It does not automatically mean they cannot speak. Many deaf or hard-of-hearing individuals use spoken language, depending on when hearing loss occurred and what support they had. Even those born deaf are not “mute”, they can produce sounds, and with intervention, some develop spoken language to varying degrees. Calling deaf people “mute” is both inaccurate and, in many communities, considered offensive (like in my country).

Muteness, on the other hand, refers to the inability—or sometimes the refusal—to speak. Selective and Traumatic mutism are often linked to psychological factors, like anxiety or responses to trauma. Mutism does not imply the person also has hearing issues.

Aphasia is something else entirely. It is a neurological condition, typically caused by brain injury, that affects language processing. It can present in different forms:

• Motor (Broca’s) aphasia: understanding is relatively preserved, but producing speech is difficult.
• Sensory (Wernicke’s) aphasia: speech remains fluent, but loses coherence and meaning, with impaired comprehension.

In neither case is the person “mute.” And crucially, aphasia is not caused by emotional distress alone.

“She knows that no single specific experience led to her loss of language.

Language worn ragged over thousands of years, from wear and tear by countless tongues and pens. Language worn ragged over the course of her life, by her own tongue and pen. Each time she tried to begin a sentence, she could feel her aged heart. Her patched and repatched, dried-up, expressionless heart. The more keenly she felt it, the more fiercely she clasped the words. Until all at once, her grip slackened. The dulled fragments dropped to her feet. The saw-toothed cogs stopped turning. A part of her, the place within her that had been worn down from hard endurance, fell away like flesh, like soft tofu dented by a spoon.”

Even within the story, there is a moment where the teacher assumes she might be deaf simply because she doesn’t speak. And this is where the issue becomes more apparent: not because the book explicitly gives us clear evidence one way or another, but because of the context. This is a woman attending Greek lessons repeatedly, in a structured setting. Over time, through interaction, through basic classroom dynamics, it would realistically become clear whether she can hear or not. The assumption of deafness based solely on silence feels less like a meaningful narrative choice and more like a shortcut.

And that, in a way, reflects my broader issue with the book: it gestures toward complexity without fully engaging with it.

Character construction

Beyond that, I struggled with the character construction. The female protagonist is shaped almost entirely by suffering—childhood trauma, loss, separation from her child—yet the narrative offers little sense of agency or direction. I kept asking: what is this building toward? What is being said that we don’t already know?

Because again, none of this is new.

To be fair, the writing itself can be beautiful. Han Kang’s background as a poet is evident in certain images and fragments that linger. But for me, isolated moments of beauty weren’t enough to sustain the novel as a whole.

And maybe part of my frustration comes precisely from the fact that I do care about the themes this book touches on. I understand the fascination with language—I share it. I’ve read novels that explore linguistics in ways that feel both intellectually rich and narratively satisfying. Babel, although I didn’t fully liked it and I have some issues with it does this exceptionally well. Even Vita Nostra, as disorienting as it is (and I’ve read it multiple times and still couldn’t fully tell you what I read), engages with language in a way that feels purposeful and deeply integrated into the story.

Here, it felt underexplored.

Conclusions

I didn’t write this review to tell you not to read Greek Lessons. I’m still planning to read more of Han Kang’s work. We Do Not Part is already on my list, and I’m genuinely curious to see how it compares. But I do think it’s worth approaching this book with a bit more critical distance and a clearer understanding of the concepts it touches on.

If anything, I hope this adds a small layer of clarity. Because when we talk about language, silence, and the loss of both, precision matters just as much as poetry.

I know we’re closing on a not-so-bright note, so if you’d like something I wholeheartedly recommend, you can take a look at last week’s review on my blog: Peony by Pearl S. Buck. Buck grew up in China as the child of missionaries and writes with a rare balance, aware both of the cultural depth of China and the impact, not always positive, of Western intervention. The novel itself, set in 19th-century China, follows a Jewish community navigating identity and assimilation. It’s thoughtful, grounded, and refreshingly clear in its storytelling…Everything I personally felt was missing here.

Until next time—happy reading!