A woman attends ancient Greek classes in Seoul with a teacher who is progressively losing his sight and who one day asks his student to read aloud. She can not. A literature teacher herself, she has lost her language again, like years ago, when she was 16. The voice. A loss that coincides with that of her mother, who died, and that of her son, whose custody has fallen to her father. Fascinated by words since she was a child, she believes that immersing herself in Plato’s Greek, the language that gave birth to the West, can restore her speech. It is the beginning of the novel The Greek Class (Random House/La Magrana), by the Korean writer Han Kang, winner of the International Booker Prize for the acclaimed The Vegetarian. A novel in which Jorge Luis Borges, Plato and Buddhism are mixed to reflect on the power and limits of language, reality and illusion and the possibility of an encounter between humans beyond words or images. Perhaps the fingers are enough. The tenderness.
“Always before writing a novel there are many motives floating around that intersect. This was born from visualizing a scene. A dark place with no other means of communication other than a hand with very short nails writing on the palm of another hand. A tactile moment, of sensations, in which you feel how hot and soft. From there the characters were born,” Kang, who presents his novel in Madrid, says in a soft and very low voice, almost a breeze.
A work in which language is omnipresent. A therapist asks the protagonist if her fascination with him is not due to her having sensed as a child that “the bond that unites language and the world is terribly weak.” Kang believes it: “Language is slippery, you always slip on it. It always makes us fail. It is the arrow that always misses. But it is the only means we have to communicate.”
Borges, who like the protagonist gradually lost his sight, is another pillar of the novel. “His latest works have those poetic annotations and his way of expressing is similar to a poem,” evokes Kang, also a poet. “When I wrote the novel before The Greek Class, which was very long, I was tired, I stopped writing for months and I couldn’t read any fiction books. Except Borges,” he recalls. Now the professor of his new novel, who has read the Argentine’s lecture on Buddhism, quotes one of his phrases: “The world is an illusion and life is a dream.” And he reflects on her: “How can it be a dream if blood flows and hot tears flow?”
For Kang, “what Borges said is the same as the fundamental idea of ??Buddhism. I have been a fan of Buddhism since I was twenty and I feel like he was too. I understand that he liked him a lot because in Buddhism when someone has an arrow stuck in them, people do not comment on why it happened to them, but rather they remove the arrow. Buddhism makes us see directly the suffering that exists in this world, but from a distance. Not flee, but look clearly, but from a distance.”
Curiously, another distance, the one between Spain and his country, has been reduced in the midst of the explosion of South Korean culture in the world: “When coming to Spain after the pandemic I have found many people who greet me in Korean, who say to me who learn Korean culture, I was very surprised. And even more so with literature, which always arrives later than the rest due to the wall of translation,” he smiles.
