Dreaming in metaphors
On New Year’s Day 2025, I got on the high-speed train from Madrid to Barcelona, all bundled up for the biting early morning cold. I hoped not so much to sleep in the next two hours and forty-five minutes, but to finish the novel I had been so deeply engrossed in the past few days, “Greek Lessons” by Han Kang.
Unlike the Ouigo train I was on, a novel by the Nobel Prize-winning Korean author is not the sort one speeds through amidst the blur of scenery. Her prose is sparse, almost achingly so, yet her economy with words somehow intensifies their emotional power. Reminiscent of Ernest Hemingway, one might say, but with more delicacy than his typically terse, er, testosterone-laden tenor.
Kang’s tremulous, despairing, and forlorn lessons
In her evocations of the claustrophobic worlds of people desperate for intimacy and connection but unable to break out of their loneliness, Kang reaches deep into her characters’ hidden histories of trauma upon trauma, sublimely bringing to life with just a few words their brokenness and their pain. I felt this so keenly in “Greek Lessons”; at times it read like an elegy: tremulous, despairing, and forlorn.
“‘The world is an illusion, and living is dreaming,’ I muttered. ‘Yet blood runs and tears gush forth.’”
Halfway through the journey, with the sun shyly peeking out of the sky, I sat upright when I came across these lines spoken by one of the two main characters, a lecturer who taught Greek, halfway through the book. Partly because it was just such beautiful writing, and partly because at that point I had just curated an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Manila called “Dream States” that explored, to quote my own curatorial notes, that realm “in between sleep and wakefulness, deep into the night, [where] we exist in another dimension. Suspended in this liminal space, our eyes are closed, yet our senses are heightened as, freed from the constraints of reality, we experience the thrill, as well as the terror, of possibility. We are active participants in nocturnal adventures that feel all too real, only to be barely remembered, if at all, in the morning.”
Hemingway’s prisoners of their pride
For Kang’s Greek teacher—as well as for the other protagonist, a woman who doesn’t speak—it isn’t about living the dream. Life itself is the nightmare, and the terror is real.
Contrast this with Hemingway’s trademark pithiness, which sometimes comes across as peacocking. After all, he was a male writer who pioneered a style of macho bravado that was judged and praised—and continues to be judged and praised—by mostly male critics. Perhaps it was because they recognized themselves in his characters: often prisoners of their own pride, incapable of honest self-reflection, absorbed in their own lofty sense of self.
I can’t help but feel that Hemingway got away with some rote descriptions simply because he was male. That said, upon re-reading “The Sun Also Rises” a few years back, a novella that seemed to me a concise distillation of male emotion, friendship, and the lingering loss of the one who got away, there was one particular line wherein his brevity suddenly whacked me sideways:
“It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night is another thing.”
In less gifted hands, such musings as those uttered above by Hemingway’s protagonist Jake Barnes about his feelings for Lady Brett Ashley would read as prosaic, melodramatic even. But Hemingway manages to deliver a sucker punch of a line that was both true to Jake’s character, in particular, and the inability of men in general to acknowledge profound emotion, much less process it.
Daoud’s retelling from a different perspective
On New Year’s Day 2026, I was halfway through another novel that I had decided to re-read, “Meursault, contre-enquête,” by the Algerian writer and journalist, Kamel Daoud. Published as “The Meursault Investigation” in English, it’s an account of the random murder of an unknown Arab by the French colonist Meursault in Albert Camus’s famous novel, “The Stranger,” from the “native’s” point of view.
In Daoud’s re-telling, the man simply known as l’Arabe is given a name, Moussa, a life, and restored dignity night after night by his younger brother Haroun, the book’s narrator. Now an old man and emboldened by alcohol, he drones on and on at the bar he frequents about the events of that fateful day at the beach in 1942, that murder in plain sight under the blazing sun.
Here’s a man desperately trying to process his complex emotions surrounding his brother’s death, and in many ways his own, unburdening himself to anyone who’ll listen.
As Haroun says (and I’m translating from the French), “A man who drinks always dreams of a man who listens to him.”
Picking up the book ten years later, I’m surprised at how much I’d forgotten. There were details in the narrative and rhythms of language that I hoped hadn’t eluded me the first time around, especially since I am reading it as I did before, in the original French.
Was there anything special about that day, Haroun asks his fellow barfly, anything that would have made Moussa realize it was his last day on earth? For it was a day like any other in Oran. He dispels the myth of “the last day.” It doesn’t exist; such a notion is an absurdity, he believed. No one has the right to a last day, only to an accidental interruption of life (translation mine).
But then, isn’t life a series of accidents anyway?
