Tag: novella

#NovNov24: Greek Lessons by Han Kang

Han Kang: Greek Lessons, transl, Deborah Smith & E. Yaewon, Penguin Books, 2024

I’ve been thinking about this book ever since I finished reading it last week and am eager to reread it, it made such a profound impression on me in just 148 pages. Han Kang certainly deserves the Nobel Prize, and this wasn’t even the book of hers I most looked forward to reading!

I’ve been recommending it to so many people since but I’ve struggled to come up with an intriguing one sentence pitch to convince them. How about: Two quiet, lonely and vulnerable people are initially connect with each other via the power of language and the interplay with silence, and how both of these shape our world. They’re initially sceptical about any connection, preferring to isolate themselves from others and live mainly in their heads, yet ultimately there is a yearning within them to see and be seen, to hear and be heard.

Both the main characters are unnamed, we only know them as the (male) Greek lecturer and the woman. In fact, nearly all of the characters in this novel are unnamed – we know them by their occupation or relationship to others (the postgrad, the philosophy student, the son, the therapist). Only two characters are named, both of them important to the lecturer in Ancient Greek: Ran, his sister, and Joachim Gründel, his best friend from the time he lived in Germany, who had been condemned to die young by a failing body despite dozens of operations. The lecturer himself is on the verge of losing his eyesight, although he’s managed to keep it hidden so far from the college authorities.

Some chapters are in first person from the lecturer’s point of view (and often written as letters to his sister or his first love in Germany), while the woman’s chapters are in third person, perhaps echoing the fact that she has lost her voice. She has not spoken since her divorce and battle for child custody, although there’s nothing wrong with her vocal chords. Rather, it seems that she feels the burden, the weight of the world too much, and it had built up gradually within her over time, even before she lost custody of her child.

Around the period her child… first learned to speak, she had dreamed of a single word in which all human language was encompassed. It was a nightmare so vivid as to leave her back drenched in sweat. On single word, bonded with a tremendous density and gravity. A language that would, the moment someone opened their mouth and pronounced it, explode and expand as all matter had at the universe’s beginning.

Well, would you be able to bear the responsibility of uttering such a word, if there is a possibility that it exists? Even more interestingly, the woman had lost her ability to speak once before, as a child, and what brought it back was her learning a new language, French. So she has started learning Ancient Greek in an effort to bring back her speech. It doesn’t seem to work, and in fact her language teacher suspects that she might be deaf as well as mute. So how can these two isolated people who yearn for some sort of connection communicate with each other without language?

This is a book for linguists, anthropologists, philosophers, because it shows us how language shapes the way we see the world, but also that there is a world beyond language, that we are unable to describe but nevertheless can viscerally feel is there. The author does a fantastic job of conveying that with language that feels like poetry and is all about the gaps, the blank spaces, as well as every word carrying its weight.

It feels like she’s walked this road before, wrapped up in a similar sense of shame and embarrassment. She would still have had language then, so the emotions would have been clearer, stronger.

But now there are no words inside her.

Words and sentences track her like ghosts, at a remove from her body, but near enough to be within ear- and eyeshot.

It is thanks to that distance that any emotion not strong enough drops away from her like a scrap of weakly adhering tape.

She only looks. She looks, and doesn’t translate any of the things that she sees into language.

Images of objects form in her eyes, and they move, fluctuate, or are erased in time with her steps, without ever being translated into words.

Language becomes inadequate to express the richness of human experience or of the universe. It often feels like the woman is experiencing writer’s block, or that she is feeling the futility of attempting to make sense of the world.

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.

Well, if that doesn’t echo my experience of attending a memoir writing course! 😉

The book is also about displacement, about living among other languages and cultures, about the ways in which the new identities we are able to create for ourselves when we move to another country are never completely distinct, but rather like palimpsests:

Ink overlays ink, memory overlays memory, bloodstain overlays bloodstain. Serenity over serenity, smile over smile, bears down.

There are so many layers to this book, so many ways that each passage could be interpreted, which is why I want to return to it again and again. The prose throughout is hauntingly beautiful, by turns lyrical and resilient, melancholy and fierce. As for the last few chapters (with their hugely varied appearance on the page in terms of italics or standard font, and line spacing), they feel like pure prose poems. Han Kang has really pushed hard with this work to make us question the concept of a novel and its form, but it certainly worked well for me. Above all, the book feels like it’s an exhortation to live rather than overthink, although you might say it is in itself a beautiful poetic exercise in overthinking. And yet:

You said, This thing we call life mustn’t ever become something endured.

You said, Dreaming of another world than this is a sin.

And so to you, beauty was the thronging streets.

That tram that stops brimming with simmering sunshine.

The furiously racing heart,

the swelling lungs,

the still-warm lips,

and the fervent rubbing of those lips against another’s.

Finally, I must express my respect and admiration for the translators of this novel. It must have been very much like translating poetry, where each word carries so many nuances and so much weight. Add to that all the philosophical concepts, the many references to science and Greek, Hangul and Chinese signs appearing in the text and requiring explanation, and you can see that this is a virtuoso text in the original, rendered (performed?) with consummate skill into English by the translators.

#JanuaryInJapan: A Cat, a Man and Two Women

Tanizaki Junichirō: A Cat, a Man and Two Women, trans. Paul McCarthy, Daunt Books, 2017.

Tanizaki Junichirō (I’m sorry, I just can’t cope any more with the Western habit of reversing Japanese author names to suit our own standards – it is surname first in Japanese and in many other languages) was one of the leading Japanese authors of the 20th century and one of the contenders for the Nobel Prize in Literature in the 1960s (he died in 1965 and in the end it was Kawabata who was the first Japanese to win it). His obsessions with eroticism, fetishism and violence did not endear him hugely to me when I was a student, but I should add that not all of his books are like that.

He was a huge fan of Genji Monogatari and translated it into modern Japanese, so it’s no surprise that the clash between tradition and modernity, between East and West are recurring themes in his (often best) work. The Makioka Sisters has a Chekhovian or Thomas Mann Buddenbrooks feel to it (not just because of its title, which is actually Sasameyuki – or ‘thin/lightly falling snow’ in Japanese); it depicts the decline of a merchant family in Osaka, but also the end of an era. His collection of essays on Japanese art and aesthetics In Praise of Shadows is also worth a read. But I can’t say I ever found his work amusing or charming… until now.

The 120 page novella A Cat, a Man and Two Women is one of Tanizaki’s lighter-hearted works and was written perhaps as a bit of a relief from the struggles of working for five years on the translation of Genji. A love triangle – or should that be a square? – it clearly shows that the author understood cats (and perhaps women too) very well. Shozo is a simple, unsophisticated man, somewhat easily manipulated (certainly when it suits him) by his mother or his second wife Fukuko. Meanwhile, his spurned first wife Shinako claims that she wants custody of their tortoiseshell cat Lily. But why does Shinako, who seemed to be jealous of Lily while they were all living in the same house, really want the cat? Is it because she knows that Shozo is so smitten with his pet that he will start visiting her once more?

Each of the humans in the story sets out to use Lily as a pawn, but in the end the cat proves to be the mistress of them all, drawing out both the best and the worst qualities of the people fighting over her. What is most touching about the story is the description of Lily as she ages – these are the passages where it becomes clear that Tanizaki must have been a great cat lover himself.

There were many signs of Lily’s rapid decline: one of them, for example, was her no longer being able to jump up with ease to Shozo’s height and snatch a bite to eat… each year the number of leaps grew fewer, and the height she reached lower. Recently, if she were shown a bit of food when she was hungry, she would first check to see if it was something she liked or not, and then jump; and even so, it had to be held no higher than a foot or so above her head. If it were any higher she would give up the idea of jumping and either climb up Shozo’s body or, when even that seemed too much for her, simply look up at him with those soulful eyes, her nose twitching hungrily… When Shinako got that sad look in her eyes, it didn’t bother Shozo very much; but for some reason, when it was Lily, he was strangely overcome with pity.

It seemed oddly appropriate to be reading this story about love for one’s pet during the week when the Pope expressed dismay that people prefer pets over having children (Shozo does not have any children with either his first or his second wife). Certainly, the closeness between Shozo and his cat is excessive at times – forcing his wife to cook something she hates for the sake of feeding it to the cat instead of eating it himself, or exchanging farts under the bedcovers. Yet I dare any animal lover not to be moved by that final scene, when he holds Lily on his lap and she purrs and allows herself to be stroked, but doesn’t seem to recognise him. Of course, you can also see it as the transience of life and marriage itself…

A slight story, but a beautifully observed and sensitively written study of human (and feline) nature. Tony Malone reviewed this when it was first reissued by Daunt, Karen aka Kaggsy reviewed it for #1936Club, while Annabel reviewed it for last year’s Japan challenge. This post will be linked to Meredith’s record-breaking 15th (fifteenth!) Japanese Literature Challenge.