Books

Review by Francis Sheppard

I noticed that one reviewer, from The Guardian, recommended a second read. I did so, having made no connection with the novel on the first. That was partly because I only ever read it at the very end of the day, and stretched it over too much time. The writing had struck me as disjointed. It made no concession to the reader. Who was supposed to be speaking? Why these characters, hinted-at early, identified so late in the story? Were the italicised sections actually intended as stand-alone poems?

As I went back to it, I found it a truly poetic novel demanding, as does much contemporary poetry, that the reader constructs the work from offered fragments. The outline narrative however had always been clear. A woman who has, for the deepest of psychological reasons, lost connection with her mother-tongue, in fact with all living language, seeks to reinstate language by learning one that is dead – Ancient Greek.

Her teacher at the evening classes that she attends, and with whom she eventually forms a relationship, has a comparable disability – he is going blind and looks forward to Braille as his sole literary link. Approaching middle age, it is his life, to date, that is dwelt upon. He has gloried in all that is vivid. Beyond that, experiences have been painful. A teenage love affair ended suddenly and disastrously, in violence at his declaration. A male friendship, through which he was introduced to the philosophy of Plato, was short-lived, through terminal illness. Among so many experiences of loss, he nevertheless remains true to his chosen hard discipline of Greek language and thought. While never at home in the European country to which his family moved in his childhood, the deepening understanding of the cultural roots of that society - is counterpoised. Of a physical return to one’s origins, in this case to a Seoul that in absence has grown to a city of ten million, where familiar and beautiful landmarks are now surrounded –

Back when we still lived here, the road that led up to the temple had been flanked on both sides by potato fields; today, those fields were smothered by cement, and residential low-rises had been built over them.

In the dark of the evening that follows, watching ‘the light ripple up the insides of the red-and-white lanterns at each gust of wind’ comes a moment of revelation, connecting the ancient European civilisation to that of East Asia.

That there had once been a word that encapsulated both beauty and the sacred, without their yet having fallen away from each other, just as colour and clarity had formed one body within another word – the truth of this had never before been brought home to me with such vibrant intensity.

It is this, an absorption in language that is in its pristine state, where purity of thought is not subject to vast alterations of interpretation, that brings the woman out of her loneliness to one with the same absorption, best able to comprehend a life where one’s own language has lost all meaning, who now through shared experience of calamity, is able to invest his story with meaning.