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‘Greek Lessons’ Can Keep You Sane
Before she won the 2024 Nobel Prize in literature, I’d never heard of South Korean writer Han Kang. Now I feel indebted to her.
If you were certain you’d become totally blind at any moment, would you sit down and write a letter to the lost love of your youth? That’s what happens in Han Kang’s Greek Lessons, which has nothing — and everything — to do with America’s recent presidential election.
I picked up the novel from my library as soon as I heard that Ms. Kang had won this year’s Nobel Prize in literature. It’s what I do most years to keep from landing in a months-long holds-queue. Which, admittedly, is not as bad as waiting for retail’s next available agent to take my call “in the order which it was received.” But in the case of books, why wait when all you need to do is get to the library before the line even forms.
The Nobel prize for literature was announced on October 11th of this year, but I didn’t dig into Kang’s novel until election night because I needed to finish another book first. Mistake, you say? To the contrary. Because as it turned out, Greek Lessons became my Get Out of Jail Free Card.
Choosing sanity
This might sound crazy, but a long time ago when all anyone could talk about was…
