Greek Lessons by Han Kang
About this episode
The episode discusses Han Kang's novel Greek Lessons, exploring its themes and connections to the Odyssey.
This week we take a – somewhat unplanned – detour from our James Joyce sequence, which we put on pause while we finished reading the book! We're taking the chance to include in our series on modern Odysseys an episode we recorded a while ago on the 2024 Nobel Prize winner Han Kang’s masterly short novel Greek Lessons . Written in Korean and set in Seoul, Greek Lessons is another moment in which a modern writer takes on the characters and preoccupations of the Odyssey and reinvents them to tell a story about Korea's complex history. Greek Lessons is about an Ancient Greek teacher in Seoul who is losing his sight, and a Korean student who has lost her capacity to speak.The title and opening sentences of Greek Lessons take us directly to big, epic stories about prophecy, blindness and insight, referring among others to the blinded prophet Tiresias, who gives Odysseus predictions about what awaits him in his attempt to return to Ithaca. The novel starts with a reference to the great Argentinian writer Jeorg Luis Borges. As his dying wish, Borges requested the epitaph ‘He took the sword and laid the naked metal between them.’ What Han Kang doesn’t tell us (we’re meant to figure it…
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